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 demands oil companies lower gas prices for American consumers

President Donald Trump has taken to Truth Social to criticize Chevron CEO Mike Wirth following a television interview in which the executive touted his company’s success.

On Monday, the president argued that in the interview with Fox Business, Wirth failed to credit the administration’s efforts to assist oil companies, which the president said provided necessary strength and stability to the U.S. energy sector.

“The only thing he conveniently forgot to mention is that, without the genius, foresight, strength, and stability, of the TRUMP Administration, the Oil Industry, and our Country itself, would be DEAD!” Trump wrote.

Trump pointed to Chevron’s operations in Venezuela as an example of the administration’s influence, before calling on oil executives across the industry to lower fuel prices for consumers immediately.

“Get your consumer (retail!) Oil Prices DOWN, NOW!” the president stated.

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The Pentagon’s Hidden Housing Scandal: Outsourcing Duty Of Care

Sen. Jon Ossoff released a report on July 8 documenting lead exposure in a newborn, mold-related emergency room visits, and a cockroach infestation living inside a family’s oven, all in privatized military housing at Fort Benning and Fort Stewart. Read it and you’d think it was written in 2022. It wasn’t. That’s the scandal: the Pentagon outsourced a duty of care to private landlords and never enforced the contracts meant to keep it intact.

I’ve spent thirty years in institutional investment management and now serve as an expert witness in fiduciary litigation. The pattern is one I recognize immediately: an institution hands a core obligation to a private operator, collects a fee for oversight it doesn’t actually perform, and treats the delegation itself as if it discharged the duty. It didn’t. Outsourcing a duty of care doesn’t outsource the duty.

Congress created the Military Housing Privatization Initiative in 1996 to fix decrepit on-base housing without loading the capital cost onto the Pentagon’s books. Private companies would own, renovate, and maintain the homes under leases running as long as fifty years, with servicemembers’ Basic Allowance for Housing flowing straight to the landlord as rent. The Pentagon would keep oversight, backed by incentive fees for good performance and penalties for bad. On paper, a clean alignment of interests. In practice, a guaranteed revenue stream with an oversight function nobody actually staffed.

Fort Stewart’s housing has been run by Balfour Beatty Communities since the base was privatized. In December 2021, Balfour Beatty pleaded guilty to one count of major fraud against the United States, agreeing to pay more than $65 million in criminal fines, restitution, and a related civil settlement. The company’s employees falsified maintenance records and destroyed resident comment cards between 2013 and 2019 to fraudulently collect incentive fees they hadn’t earned. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said the fraud was “a consequence of BBC’s broken corporate culture” that put profit ahead of servicemembers’ welfare.

Four months later, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found the conduct hadn’t stopped. Its bipartisan staff report on the mistreatment of military families in privatized housing documented that Balfour’s post-2019 behavior mirrored the misconduct behind its guilty plea; in the same period the company was under active federal investigation. A company can plead guilty to defrauding the government over housing conditions and keep collecting Basic Allowance for Housing checks from the families living in the homes it failed.

Fast-forward to this month. Fort Stewart is still Balfour Beatty’s. Fort Benning’s housing is run by a different company, the Michaels Organization’s Villages of Benning. Ossoff’s report found nearly identical failures at both: mold, lead, cover-ups, families told their complaints were handled when they weren’t. That detail should stop anyone from treating this as one bad company. Two operators, two installations, the same pattern. The failure sits in the oversight structure, not the logo on the leasing office.

The government’s own auditors have said as much. In an April 2023 report, the Government Accountability Office made 19 recommendations to improve DOD’s oversight of privatized housing, including a priority recommendation that the Pentagon set clear, consistent, department-wide home inspection standards, after finding that comparable maintenance problems were getting graded differently depending on who held the clipboard. As of GAO’s most recent public status update, that priority recommendation was still open, with DOD not expecting signed guidance until mid-2025 at the earliest. Congress had to legislate the fix GAO had already recommended.

This is the same structural failure I’ve written about previously in public pension governance, wearing a uniform instead of a suit. A pension trustee who delegates asset management to an outside manager doesn’t delegate away fiduciary responsibility for the outcome; the law is explicit that the duty stays with the trustee. The Pentagon’s relationship with its housing contractors works the same way as a matter of principle, even though the enforcement mechanism is a lease rather than ERISA. Both share the same defect: an incentive-fee structure that pays out on paperwork instead of results, and an oversight office too thin to catch the difference until a senator’s staff does the job for it.

That fix is now in the books. The Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, signed in December, directs the Secretary of War to establish a standard inspection and audit program for privatized and government-owned housing using independent, qualified inspectors, and separately tightens the rules on when a housing company may close a maintenance work order. Falsified paperwork closed BBC’s work orders and inflated its bonuses for six years before anyone with subpoena power looked at the underlying data; an inspector who doesn’t answer to the landlord closes that loophole.

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Report: Colombian Marxist Terrorists Using TikTok to Recruit Children

Armed narco-terrorist groups in Colombia are utilizing TikTok and other social media platforms to push recruitment videos targeting young children and teenagers, the Colombian newspaper El Colombiano reported on Monday.

According to El Colombiano, armed groups such as the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) terrorist group and the Clan del Golfo are engaged in a scheme described by the newspaper as “Recruitment 2.0.” The strategy sees the use of social media platform algorithms to push content towards Colombian children and teenagers in vulnerable economical situations, seeking to entice them into joining said insurgent organizations.

El Colombiano pointed out that the tactic specifically targets demographic groups of children as they are deemed more “influenceable” and because local criminal laws are more lenient towards children in the event of a future arrest.

The contents, which El Colombiano affirmed are mostly found on TikTok, entice Colombian minors with promises of future riches and luxuries. Other pieces of content reportedly used in the recruitment scheme involve deceitful offers such as false “talent-seeking” soccer tournaments and fake job offers promising competitive wages, all with the same goal of luring victims to join their ranks.

El Colombiano explained that it created a fake TikTok profile for the purposes of its report. Within “one hour,” the newspaper said, the TikTok account’s “For You” section began displaying videos of raspachínes coca leaf collectors, young people in camouflage clothing flaunting their affiliation with guerrilla groups, and individuals showing off cars, motorcycles, liquor, and luxuries, accompanied by ninja emojis — a “recurring visual code across various armed groups.”

Although TikTok has allegedly placed content filters blocking certain guerrilla-related keywords, El Colombiano explained that armed groups are completely bypassing the filters by simply using abbreviations instead of the group’s full name, such as “EP” as a replacement for FARC — the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia Marxist terrorist group, which attaches the EP (“People’s Army”) suffix to its initials.

“TikTok blocked the word ‘gaitanistas,’ for example. That is why digital recruiters tend to be more sophisticated and use coded language involving emojis,” Juan David Velasco Montoya, advisor at the Investigation and Prosecution Unit (UIA) of Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction of Peace (JEP), told El Colombiano. The Clan del Golfo sometimes refers to itself as the “Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia.”

JEP is a Colombian transitional justice mechanism established nearly a decade ago after FARC and the administration of former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos signed a “peace deal” in 2016 that allegedly saw the “dismantlement” of FARC. In reality, FARC remains active in Colombia ten years after its supposed dismantlement, committing numerous terrorist attacks over the past decade.

A UIA report cited by El Colombiano documented a 66-percent surge in the recruitment of children by Colombian insurgent groups on social media between 2022 and 2025. According to the UIA report, 44 percent of all child recruitment cases documented by the group in 2025 occurred on social media.

UIA reportedly described TikTok as the “most problematic” of the social media platforms for said recruitment. The content allegedly published by the groups on TikTok mainly targets teenagers and predominantly feature messages of money, weapons, and a “life of party and excesses.”

In 2024, Colombian authorities denounced that FARC had been using TikTok to publish content enticing minors to join the Marxist terrorist group. El Colombiano affirmed on Monday that, although Colombian authorities established guidelines to reduce the risk of recruitment by minors last year, “no concrete action has been taken” by the Chinese social media platform.

On the other hand, the recruitment content allegedly published on Facebook targets young adults instead of minors, while content allegedly published on YouTube are instead of a “political” tone. Instagram is allegedly used by Colombian armed groups to push content related to “armed confrontation and the handling of drones turned into weapons.”

UIA also reportedly found that, in addition to organizing the content’s type by platform, the posts also target boys and girls differently by “reinforcing gender stereotypes.” El Colombiano explained that, for example, content seeking to entice girls reportedly centers around the “glorification of physical beauty, dancing, and posing,” while content targeting boys highlights “strength, virility, financial means, weapons, and alcohol as a status symbol.”

According to the UIA report, the group projects that, if the situation were to continue existing as-is, Colombia could face roughly 2,321 new cases of child recruitment between 2026 and 2030 — at an average rate of one new minor every 12 hours.

Luis Fernando Quijano, director of the social services group Corporation for Peace and Social Development (Corpades), explained to El Colombiano on Monday that his organization has been documenting the alarming social media recruitment phenomenon for months.

In some cases, Quijano warned, the recruitment offer is “direct,” with some of the contents directly asking for minors between the ages of 12 and 13 to send a direct message if they want to join an insurgent group. In other cases, the recruitment enlists for international conflicts instead.

“It is recruitment through handouts, through images of young women and young men, and by portraying the illegal military life as very appealing. That is an open invitation for children and adolescents to go there,” Quijano said.

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Children’s Hospitals To Begin Offering Restorative Care For Detransitioners

When Texas Children’s Hospital’s “detransition clinic” opens in Houston, it will become the first facility of its kind, giving patients who regret life-altering procedures a chance at restorative care.

The facility, which has yet to announce an opening date, is part of an agreement with state and federal authorities to halt “gender-affirming care” at children’s hospitals while offering help to those who transitioned medically.

A 10-page settlement term sheet, recently obtained by The Epoch Times through an open records request to the Texas attorney general’s office, showed that services at the clinic will focus on multidisciplinary care.

Services are to include endocrinology, surgery, fertility counseling, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and speech pathology, among others.

In May and June, the Department of Justice (DOJ), along with the attorneys general of Texas and Ohio, secured settlements with large hospitals over allegations of fraudulent insurance billing practices related to “gender-affirming care” for children.

The hospitals denied wrongdoing in their billing practices or standards of care.

These agreements require the hospitals not only to cease transitioning procedures, but also to offer discounted or free restorative medical care to detransitioners.

Attorneys representing detransitioners and their clients praised the efforts of the DOJ and the states to assist those suffering from the consequences of life-altering medical changes.

Detransitioners are those who stopped or reversed a medical gender transition they started earlier in life.

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Newsom’s tax returns show annual income between $1.7M and $2M

The long-awaited release of California Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom’s tax returns has been heavily criticized after it was revealed that he and his wife made $1.7 million to $2 million annually from 2022 through 2024 and paid half a million a year in federal and state taxes, according to the tax returns released by his office.

The criticism surrounding the release of Newsom’s (D-Calif.) tax returns stems primarily from the tightly controlled manner in which the documents were disclosed, the lack of itemized details regarding his business holdings, specific deductions, and the omission of his most recent tax filing.

Together, these factors have led political opponents, media commentators and other transparency advocates to argue that the release fell short of genuine public disclosure.

First, the method of release drew immediate pushback from media commentators and political watchdog groups. Rather than publishing the tax documents online for direct public inspection, the governor’s office restricted access to a select group of journalists inside a controlled environment. Reporters were required to review the 700-page filing using only pen and paper, without the ability to take photographs, make digital copies or release the raw files.

Second, the structure of the returns obscured important financial details about Newsom’s business empire. While the filings showed that the bulk of the couple’s multimillion-dollar income flowed from hospitality, restaurant and winery enterprises held in a blind trust, tax returns only report aggregate income.

Third, opponents highlighted major personal deductions revealed in the returns, including tens of thousands of dollars spent on high-end designer apparel and nearly two hundred thousand dollars allocated for his own personal household staff.

Finally, the pages provided to reporters covered only tax years 2021 through 2024, as the governor and his wife filed for an extension on their 2025 returns through October. While requesting an extension is standard tax procedure, political adversaries pointed out that the omission leaves his most recent financial activity unexamined as he lays the groundwork for a prospective 2028 presidential campaign.

Reporters from outlets like The New York Times and Politico were reportedly permitted to view the documents using only pen and paper, agreeing to hold their reports until Friday morning, as Newsom faced increasing pressure to publicize the records.

These disclosures mark Newsom’s first tax release since 2022. While his salary as governor pays around $200,000 per year, the bulk of his income is generated by winery and hospitality businesses he placed into a blind trust upon taking office.

The only exception occurred in 2021, when the family earned about $800,000 by selling a Marin County home for nearly $6 million. Their total earnings reached $4.2 million that year, resulting in over $1 million paid in combined federal and state taxes. In 2022, their income dropped back to approximately $2 million.

Noethelsss, the governor’s office later argued that there was nothing unusual in the filings.

U.S. Representative James Gallagher (R-Calif.) told The Post, “Newsom’s transparency is a lot like his homelessness policy — it leaves a lot to be desired … He talks big about things about never actually delivers. This is another instance of that — only allowing select people and only pen and paper. This isn’t real transparency. There are still a lot of questions where Gavin’s money comes from,” he declared.

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Judge Blocks New York’s Law Prohibiting Federal Officers From Wearing Masks

A federal judge on Monday blocked New York’s law prohibiting federal officers from wearing face masks.

ICE agents and other federal officers wear masks to conceal their identities because of the increased attacks from the violent left.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, DHS law enforcement has experienced more than 180 vehicle attacks since Trump took office.

ICE officers are being doxxed and attacked.

“ICE officers are facing a 1,300% increase in assaults, a 3,200% increase in vehicle attacks, and an 8,000% increase in death threats,” ERO Miami Field Office Director Matthew Elliston said last month.

US District Judge Mae A. D’Agostino, an Obama appointee, said New York does not have the authority to regulate federal law enforcement activity.

New York’s corrupt Democrat Attorney General Letitia James said she is “reviewing all legal options.”

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New Forever Chemicals Coming to US Farms

If the goal is truly to Make America Healthy Again, then the latest decision from the Environmental Protection Agency raises serious questions. According to the article you sent, the EPA has approved two new fluorinated pesticides, diflufenican and epyrifenacil, for use on some of America’s most important crops, including corn, soybeans, and wheat. Neither chemical has previously been approved for use in American agriculture.

Environmental groups argue these compounds qualify as PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” under internationally recognized scientific definitions because they can persist in the environment and eventually degrade into trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), an extremely persistent fluorinated compound found in groundwater around the world. The EPA disputes that characterization, maintaining the products do not meet its regulatory definition of PFAS and that they can be used safely according to their labels.

Diflufenican has already become controversial in Europe. Denmark banned its use in part because of concerns that it contributes to TFA contamination of groundwater, while German monitoring has detected TFA in a large percentage of tested wells. Epyrifenacil has reportedly never received approval for agricultural use within the European Union. Whether those regulatory decisions ultimately prove right or wrong, they demonstrate that this is hardly an uncontested scientific issue. Governments around the world are reaching different conclusions about the same chemicals, yet American consumers are expected to assume there is nothing to debate.

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Rep. Ogles Files Articles of Impeachment Against Radical Leftist Judge Who REFUSED Ruling of Supreme Court and Blocked Trump from Ending TPS for Somalis

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) introduced articles of impeachment against radical leftist Judge Allison Burroughs who refused a Supreme Court ruling on decided to block the Trump Administration from ending the temporary protected status (TPS) for Somalis in the US.

A federal judge on Friday once again blocked the Trump Administration from terminating Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Somalis.

The termination was supposed to take effect on March 17, however, a federal judge previously halted the termination.

On Friday, US District Judge Allison Burroughs, an Obama appointee, issued a new administrative stay after the plaintiffs filed an amended complaint and an emergency motion.

There are more than 100,000 Somalis living in the US. An estimated 5,000 Somalis are eligible for Temporary Protected Status.

Judge Burroughs’ order came after the US Supreme Court ruled that the Trump Administration is allowed to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians.

The high court, in a 6-3 vote, ruled that the Temporary Protected Status is… temporary.

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Murders In The US Set To Hit 126-Year-Low Following Illegal Immigrant Deportations: DHS

Crime rates have fallen to “historic lows” across the United States, with homicides this year on track to register the lowest level in at least 126 years, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

In the first half of 2026, homicides were down 18 percent compared to the first half of last year, DHS said in a July 31 statement. Carjacking crimes tumbled 47 percent during this period, motor vehicle thefts fell 20 percent, robberies dropped 17 percent, and residential burglaries declined 13 percent.

The numbers come from a July 2026 report from the nonpartisan think tank Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) that assessed crime stats across various U.S. cities.

Compared to the first half of 2022, the second year of the Biden administration, homicides in the first half of 2026, the second year of the current Trump administration, were down by 51 percent, according to the CCJ report.

For violent crimes, 2 percent fewer aggravated assaults and 6 percent fewer gun assaults were reported in the first half of 2026 compared to the same period last year. However, domestic violence incidents were up 8 percent, and sexual assaults by 3 percent for this period.

When compared to the first half of 2019, the year prior to the COVID-19 pandemic onset, homicides, aggravated assault, gun assault, sexual assault, domestic violence, robbery, and carjacking crimes were all lower in the first six months of 2026, the report said.

In its statement, DHS gave examples of some of the illegal immigrants with criminal histories who have been deported from the United States: A Salvadoran national with convictions for homicide and assault, a Costa Rican with convictions for property crimes and burglary, a Honduran Tren de Aragua gang member convicted for robbery, and a Vietnamese national convicted for armed carjacking.

“President [Donald] Trump promised to make America safe again, and he has done just that,” Lauren Bis, assistant secretary at the DHS’s Office of Public Affairs, said in the statement.

“Crime has fallen to record lows under the Trump Administration.”

“It’s no surprise that this drop in crime coincides with deportations of dangerous criminal illegal aliens. It is common sense. When you remove criminals from the country, crime rates fall,” Bis said.

In the first year of the current Trump administration, almost three million illegal immigrants had left the United States, then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in a Jan. 20 DHS statement.

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Fauci privately estimated COVID-19 death rate far lower than he gave Congress, diary shows

r. Anthony Fauci privately believed that the death rate of the COVID-19 was much lower than he told Congress just one month later, according to a record kept by the health official from February 2020. 

The diary entry was made public by Sen. Rand Paul, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, prior to Dr. Fauci’s testimony earlier this week. During his appearance, Fauci refused to answer any substantive questions and cited the 5th Amendment more than 110 times. 

During his time as the leading government health official during the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci kept a meticulous record of his meetings, phone calls, and other day-to-day activities. 

Fauci has faced scrutiny from Republicans for years for his role in the early response to the COVID-19 pandemic as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force that included recommendations for school closures and social distancing.

On March 11, 2020, as the coronavirus spread beyond China to Europe and the United States, Fauci told the House Oversight Committee that he estimated COVID-19’s fatality at 3% and told lawmakers it was much more deadly than the seasonal flu. 

The “case fatality rate” was “more like 0.2-0.3%”, Fauci’s personal notes reveal

“The stated mortality over all of this when you look at all the data, including China is about three percent. It first started off as two and three,” Fauci told the committee at the time. 

“I think if you count all the cases of minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic infection, that probably brings the mortality rate down to somewhere around one percent, which means it is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu,” Fauci continued. “I think that is something that people can get their arms around and understand.”

But, in a diary entry from just weeks before his testimony on Capitol Hill, Fauci memorialized a phone call with former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Tom Frieden in which both agreed the real “case fatality rate” was “more like 0.2-0.3%.”

“Tom Frieden called me this AM and we discussed various aspects of the outbreak. He and I are on the same page in thinking tht [sic] this is acting like a bad influenza in its transmissibility and that the denominator is much greater than 34,867 (above) making the case fatality rate (CFR) more like 0.2-0.3 % rather than 2.0%,” Fauci wrote in the February 8 diary entry. 

You can read Fauci’s notes below: 

File

2026.07.24_Tonys-Diary-Package.pdf

“Stirring up fear and anxiety”

Dr. Harvey Risch, Chairman of the Trump administration’s Cancer Panel at the Department of Health and Human Services, told Just the News that Fauci’s behavior is an example of the “gigantic hubris and toxic paternalism” in the public health industry. 

“The fact that he knew this and couldn’t say the truth in public means he had other interests to pursue,” Risch said on the Just the News, No Noise TV show.  

“And, I think the worst one of all the ones […] was his estimate of the fatality rate of COVID that he was saying publicly it was one to 2%, stirring up fear and anxiety, while privately he was writing that it was a 10th of a percent, which is like a bad flu and would not have generated the same anxiety in the general public had he spoken the truth,” Risch added. 

The more than 1,141 pages of records released by the Senate committee earlier this week provide the most detailed glimpse into Dr. Fauci’s experience of the COVID-19 pandemic and the government’s response to it. 

The pages show, for example, how Fauci appeared to work to squash the lab leak theory, even though he, nor the vast majority of the scientists he consulted, accepted the Chinese “wet market” theory of COVID-19 origin in early 2020. 

Fauci’s alleged Feb. 1, 2020 personal notes recount the phone call that eventually produced the Proximal Origin paper, which concluded natural origin was the only credible explanation for COVID’s emergence, Just the News previously reported. 

Only two of a dozen scientists on the call were “sure that this could occur naturally, and we should not waste our time and divert effort to pursue this,” Fauci said, referring to the possibility that the coronavirus’ unusual ability to easily infect humans was engineered.

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