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 Has a Habit of Asserting Broad, Unreviewable Authority

In separate attacks this month, the U.S. military blew up two speedboats in the Caribbean Sea, killing 14 alleged drug smugglers. Although those men could have been intercepted and arrested, President Donald Trump said he decided summary execution was appropriate as a deterrent to drug trafficking.

To justify this unprecedented use of the U.S. military to kill criminal suspects, Trump invoked his “constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive” to protect “national security and foreign policy interests.” That assertion of sweeping presidential power fits an alarming pattern that is also apparent in Trump’s tariffs, his attempt to summarily deport suspected gang members as “alien enemies,” and his planned use of National Guard troops to fight crime in cities across the country.

Although Trump described the boat attacks as acts of “self-defense,” he did not claim the people whose deaths he ordered were engaged in literal attacks on the United States. His framing instead relied on the dubious proposition that drug smuggling is tantamount to violent aggression.

While that assumption is consistent with Trump’s often expressed desire to kill drug dealers, it is not consistent with the way drug laws are ordinarily enforced. In the absence of violent resistance, a police officer who decided to shoot a drug suspect dead rather than take him into custody would be guilty of murder.

That seems like an accurate description of the attacks that Trump ordered. Yet he maintains that his constitutional license to kill, which apparently extends to civilians he views as threats to U.S. “national security and foreign policy interests,” transforms murder into self-defense.

Trump has asserted similarly broad authority to impose stiff, ever-changing tariffs on goods imported from scores of countries. Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected that audacious power grab, saying it was inconsistent with the 1977 statute on which Trump relied.

The Federal Circuit said the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which does not mention import taxes at all and had never before been used to impose them, does not give the president “unlimited authority” to “revise the tariff schedule” approved by Congress. The appeals court added that “the Government’s understanding of the scope of authority granted by IEEPA would render it an unconstitutional delegation.”

Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) against alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua has also run into legal trouble. This month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit concluded that Trump had erroneously relied on a nonexistent “invasion or predatory incursion” to justify his use of that 1798 statute.

Trump argued that the courts had no business deciding whether he had complied with the law. “The president’s determination that the factual prerequisites of the AEA have been met is not subject to judicial review,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign told the 5th Circuit.

Trump took a similar position in the tariff case. As an opposing lawyer noted, it amounted to the claim that “the president can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, for as long as he wants, so long as he declares an emergency.”

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‘I really feel for Kirk’s loved ones’: Professor apologizes for assassination comments

A University of California San Diego writing instructor walked back his comments about the assassination of Charlie Kirk in comments given to The College Fix.

After the killing of the Turning Point USA CEO, Michael Morshed wrote on a friend’s social media post: “He f**cked around and found out.”

But now he said he regrets his words.

“The most basic answer is I said it because sometimes I’m an idiot who acts impulsive, and my tongue is a bit too sharp. I have been since I was a kid,” Morshed told The Fix via email on Monday.

“More importantly, I think it was an insensitive comment on my part. I don’t think Kirk deserved to be killed. I think he was a [debater] and was non-violent from what I have seen,” Morshed said. “Given that, he did not deserve violence against him, and I hope the person who killed him goes to jail. That person was 100% in the wrong.”

The killing has led Morshed to look more into Kirk and find some areas of agreement.

“When someone is killed, I feel horrible for their loved ones, and I am seeing in the aftermath of Kirk’s death how much people loved him,” Morshed told The Fix. “This is leading me to look into Kirk some more, and I have found that I agree with the core of some of his ideas.”

Morshed also wanted to provide further context to what he was trying to say. “The essence of my opinion is that, while not deserving to die, Kirk could have taken more precautions,”

Morshed, suggesting better security was needed and the events should have been indoors for Kirk’s own safety.

The professor also said many young people debating him are “already sensitive and maybe even mentally ill” which created the potential for more problems.

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Democrat Candidate for Ohio Attorney General Posts ‘F*ck Charlie Kirk’

A Democrat candidate for Ohio Attorney General, Elliot Forhan, celebrated the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on social media.

In a social media post, Forhan — a former state representative, wrote, “Fuck Charlie Kirk.”

He continued, “If you cannot call a bigot a bigot in America, then we do not have the free speech that he pretended to care about.”

Of course, Forhan provided no examples of Kirk displaying bigotry. Nor did the candidate for Ohio’s top law enforcement post express any kind of sympathy for Kirk or his family over the horrific public assassination.

Commenters were not having it.

“You are mean and rude and have no place in public life. Our state is much better without you in elected office. You perpetuate the very things that are ruining the political and civic landscape and that you claim to be opposed to (hate and bullying),” one Facebook commenter responded.

“Not appropriate. Spreading more hatred and division,” another said.

One commented, “Disgusting that people in office think this way. Regardless your stance or political views no one deserves to die for expressing their beliefs. I hope you don’t get voted in because it’s people like you that keep spreading hate and discord very sad in my opinion! God bless America.”

In another post, Forhan shared a New York Times opinion article on his Facebook page with the caption, “Charlie Kirk was a champion of tyranny, not democracy. We should not pretend otherwise.”

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FDA targets Hims & Hers, posts more than 100 letters to drugmakers

The Trump administration is cracking down on pharmaceutical advertising and they are specifically targeting telehealth companies that promote unofficial versions of weight loss medications.

More than 100 letters were posted by the Food and Drug Administration to drugmakers and online prescribing companies. Hims & Hers built a multibillion-dollar business around weight loss interventions. The letters warned the companies, including Hims & Hers, to remove “false and misleading ” promotional statements and advertising from their website.

Your claims imply that your products are the same as an FDA-approved product when they are not,” states the warning letter, dated Sept. 9.

Hims said Tuesday that it “looks forward to engaging with the FDA.”

“Our website and our customer-facing materials note that compounded treatments are not approved or evaluated by the FDA,” the company said in a statement.

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How the Left Programmed Young People to Hate

In the spring of 1975, the Red Army Faction, more popularly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, stormed the West German Embassy in Stockholm and murdered two of its staff before setting the building ablaze. In its aftermath, a British tabloid printed a headline whose bluntness masked its profundity: ‘So, Who’s Sick?‘

It was less a headline than a rhetorical diagnosis, reflecting the bewilderment at these seemingly senseless acts of terror. Was it the bourgeois world condemned as corrupt by these self-styled revolutionaries, or was it the revolutionaries themselves, who in their righteous fervour appeared possessed by demons?

The question was never one that admitted an easy answer in that moment, and it remains just as piercing in ours. For when, half a century later, Charlie Kirk was struck down in the midst of civic debate, and when voices on the ‘progressive’ Left respond not with horror but with unholy glee, we are forced once again to confront the same ambiguity. Who is diseased? Who is truly sick? The question still hangs in the air, accusing its audience as much as its subjects.

The Eclipse of Compassion

The murder of Charlie Kirk was barbarous enough, but what followed was more chilling still. Social media, that great theatre of contemporary sentiment, resounded with elation rather than grief. Where the natural response should have been mourning and sober reflection, there was instead celebration, applause, even exultation. The old pieties of compassion and human dignity were trampled beneath a chorus of malevolence.

If we return to 1975, we can discern that the spectacle is hardly without precedent. The chronicler of the Red Army Faction’s rise and fall, Stefan Aust, described the psychosis that fuelled its violence as the Baader-Meinhof Complex: a toxic brew of revolutionary ideology, middle-class angst and personality cultism, in which politics fused with pathology. Terror and bloodshed were the logical expression of this worldview.

Jillian Becker, in her study of the same phenomenon published in 1977, placed the emergence of the Baader-Meinhof gang within an extended historical frame, tracing how West Germany’s post-war radicals were the children of those who had lived through the Third Reich — parents whose relationship with Nazism was often ambivalent, sometimes unrepentant. Their children judged them guilty of complicity or cowardice. In turn, they felt they had no tradition to receive let alone uphold, no cultural authority to embrace as their own. Becker memorably described them as Hitler’s Children, who expressed their alienation in violence against the very society that had given them life and often prosperity.

The parallels with today are clear. The obnoxious, jeering, bratty mobs on social media and their elevation of spite into virtue: these too are not simply political stances but symptoms of generational breakdown. Becker’s ‘lost children’ of post-war Germany were orphaned by the silence and ambiguities of their parents’ Nazi past. Today’s youth, though shaped by different conditions, are estranged in an analogous way — heirs to a liberal order that preached emancipation but delivered only deracination.

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Review of domestic terrorism after Kirk’s murder shows Biden politicized issue, intel, fudged data

Auseful picture of the domestic terrorism threat in America in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk has not yet come into focus, as the actual threat-scape has been muddled by the politicization of intelligence and by an overbroad use of the phrase “domestic terrorism.”

A review of the Biden administration’s application of the phrase shows that the phrase was used as a justification for targeting January 6 rioters, parents concerned about what their children were being taught in schools, and a wildly uneven treatment of those groups when compared to the widespread violence and destruction caused by Antifa and other progressive groups. 

The issue came to light as authorities announced last week that they had arrested 22-year-old Tyler Robinson in connection to the killing of Kirk, a popular conservative influencer and ally of President Donald Trump. Robinson allegedly gunned down Kirk last Wednesday at Utah Valley University. Kirk’s murder comes after two attempted assassinations of Trump and years of the Biden administration pointing to the January 6 riots and claiming “rightwing” extremism or “domestic terrorism” as the main domestic threat facing the U.S. 

Nonetheless, it took the FBI years to acknowledge that the mass shooting at a Republican congressional group practicing baseball —  by self-professed “Bernie Bro” James T. Hodgkinson — was an act of domestic terror.

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The Strange Case of Summary Execution of Eleven Suspects in Caribbean Waters

The U.S. government has been executing suspected terrorists without indictment, much less trial, since the dawning of the Drone Age, on November 3, 2002. On that day, the George W. Bush administration used a Predator drone to dispatch six alleged terrorist suspects in a car driving down a road in Yemen, far from any battlefield. This unprecedented act of extrajudicial execution was precipitated by the attacks on U.S. soil of September 11, 2001, which set the stage for a new, sanguinary, period of military history.

Officials such as John Brennan, Barack Obama’s CIA director, and former CEO (from 2005 to 2009) of a private military contracting firm, the Analysis Corporation, assumed the lethal authority to incinerate potentially dangerous human beings, including U.S. citizens such as Anwar al-Awlaki. Officials at the helm of what became a literal killing machine adamantly insisted on the necessity of deploying deadly force wherever they ordered missile strikes. The psychological climate in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, powerfully suppressed criticism, and the new techno-killers enjoyed the benefit of the doubt on the part of both the mainstream press and most of the populace. After years of launching missiles covertly, under a pretext of State Secrets privilege, the summary execution of suspects came eventually to be openly acknowledged by President Obama and widely accepted as completely normal, a standard operating procedure, whether carried out by the Pentagon or the CIA.

Even while thus terrorizing millions of innocent people, the perpetrators of the relentless targeted killing campaigns always characterized them as antiterrorism initiatives. As the nugatory, counterproductive “Global War on Terror” dragged on, fomenting anger among locals and creating more radical jihadists than it eliminated, the so-called battlefield expanded to include countries where war was never officially waged, as it had been by President George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq. The inhabitants of Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Mali, and other parts of the Middle East and Africa were also regularly terrorized by the lethal drones flying above their heads, never knowing when or where the next missile would make contact with human beings on the ground.

Each successive president insisted that the AUMFs (Authorizations for Use of Military Force) granted by Congress to George W. Bush in 2001 and 2002 sufficed to make any suspected terrorist or associate identified by U.S. government authorities fair game for summary execution. Among the “authorities” enlisted to create kill lists were privately contracted analysts with financial incentives to locate persons suspected of terrorist acts, whether past or, preposterously, potentially in the future. Despite a long list of documented incidents involving the U.S. government’s annihilation of entirely innocent persons, and often their families as well, such as the case of Zemari Ahmadi in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 29, 2021, so-called suspects continue to be “lit up” by missile strikes, provided only that whoever happens to be the commander in chief either agrees with the lethal determination or has delegated his war-making authority to those in his employ.

Many of the missiles have been launched by remote control, from unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), a.k.a. remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs), to eliminate persons in places where no ground troops would ever have been sent in to kill the suspects, because, among other reasons, they were not acting as armed combatants at the time of their death. The targets were not provided with the opportunity to surrender (most were not armed anyway) and in fact met their demise at the hands of the drone warriors only because of the development of the technological capacity to kill by remote control. No officials in the executive branch of the federal government ever publicly debated whether rejecting the advances made in the Magna Carta, the presumption of innocence, the very concept of due process, and the post-World War II Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a good idea. Instead, We Kill Because We Can became the U.S. government’s guiding principle throughout the Global War on Terror, as it evidently continues to be today.

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UK, US Sign $42 Billion Tech Deal To Boost AI Partnership

The United Kingdom and the United States struck a technology pact on Sept. 16 that would bring $42 billion in investments from U.S. tech giants into the UK’s AI infrastructure.

The deal was reached as President Donald Trump arrived in the UK for a two-day state visit, during which he is expected to meet King Charles and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Under the “Tech Prosperity Deal,” the two nations agreed to cooperate in advancing AI, quantum computing, and nuclear technology, according to a statement issued by the UK government.

Major U.S. tech companies—Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, and CoreWeave—will invest in the UK’s AI infrastructure, including data centers and computer chips, as part of the agreement.

The deal is expected to generate more than 5,000 jobs in the northeast of England, which the UK government said will become a new AI growth zone.

The two countries will collaborate on research schemes to further the use of AI to allow for “targeted treatments and other shared priorities like fusion energy,” according to the statement.

This could lead to “life-changing breakthroughs like developing targeted treatments for those suffering with cancer or rare and chronic diseases,” the UK government said.

“This Tech Prosperity Deal marks a generational step change in our relationship with the U.S., shaping the futures of millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic, and delivering growth, security and opportunity up and down the country,” Starmer said.

The deal includes a $30 billion investment from Microsoft over four years, its largest commitment in the UK.

The company stated in a blog post that the funding will help develop the country’s “largest supercomputer,” which will be equipped with more than 23,000 advanced AI chips.

Under the U.S.–UK tech pact, Nvidia will partner with UK companies to deploy 120,000 advanced GPU chips across the country, marking its largest rollout in Europe to date, according to the statement.

“Today marks a historic chapter in U.S. – United Kingdom technology collaboration,” Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said.

OpenAI said it will team up with British company Nscale and Nvidia to launch a Stargate UK project to boost the UK’s sovereign computing capabilities, as part of the tech pact.

The UK and the United States signed a trade agreement in June on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Canada. The deal still left UK steel and aluminum subject to 25 percent tariffs, rates that the UK government is working to reduce.

Speaking to reporters before departing for the UK on Sept. 16, Trump indicated that he was willing to further negotiate trade with the UK government.

“They want to see if they can refine the trade deal a little bit. We made a deal, and it’s a great deal. And I’m into helping them,” the president told reporters.

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Dearborn’s Muslim mayor tells Christian he’s ‘not welcome’ in debate on honoring pro-terror Arab leader

At a Dearborn City Council meeting last week, Mayor Abdullah H. Hammoud told local resident Edward “Ted” Barham, a Christian, that he was “not welcome” in the city after Barham raised concerns about new street signs honoring Arab American News publisher Osama Siblani.

FOX 2 Detroit reported that the signs honoring Siblani were placed at intersections on Warren Avenue by Wayne County, not the City of Dearborn. But the mayor escalated the debate, telling Barham, “Although you live here, you are not welcome here.”

Barham introduced himself as “Ted Barham, Dearborn resident,” and objected to two intersections being renamed after Siblani.

He said, “He’s a promoter of Hezbollah and Hamas” before quoting past remarks from Siblani, including, “He talks about how the blood of the martyrs irrigates the land of Palestine … whether we are in Michigan and whether we are in Yemen. Believe me, everyone should fight within his means. They will fight with stones, others will fight with guns, others fight with planes, drones, and rockets.” 

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GOP-led DOGE panel warns of risks of weather manipulation

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene sounded the alarm Tuesday on weather-tampering efforts aimed at counteracting climate change and promoting rainfall, warning the left wants to take away Americans’ “God-given rights over the Earth in order to satisfy their godless climate cult beliefs.”

“No one wants to be a lab rat,” she said.

Chairing a DOGE subcommittee hearing called “Playing God with the Weather – a Disastrous Forecast,” Ms. Greene said concerns over attempts to change the climate — including solar geo-engineering that seeks to cool the Earth by reflecting sunlight and cloud-seeding to increase rainfall — reach far beyond the conspiratorial corners of the internet.

“What this whole debate comes down to is, who controls the skies?” said Mr. Greene, Georgia Republican. “Do we believe in God and that he has dominion over his perfect creation of planet Earth?

“Do we believe that he has given us everything we need to survive as a civilization since the beginning of time?” she said. “Or do you believe in man’s claim of authority over the weather, based on scientists that have only been alive for decades and weren’t here to witness the climate changes since the beginning of time?”

Democrats accused Republicans of exaggerating their concerns, and said more research needed to be done.

They also criticized President Trump and Republicans for pulling out of international climate-change negotiations and slashing funding for the Environmental Protection Agency.

“The purpose of the EPA, literally, this is why the EPA exists, is to regulate, study and understand how modifications to the environment impact human health and the environment,” said New Mexico Rep. Melanie Stansbury, the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee.

For years, the furor over weather manipulation efforts was chalked up mainly to conspiracy theorists who pointed to airplane “chemtrails” and other phenomena as proof the government or shady groups were releasing dangerous chemicals for nefarious reasons, including to manipulate the weather, the population, and even people’s minds.

The subject area largely flew under the radar before Mr. Trump and Republicans took back control of Washington.

EPA Secretary Lee Zeldin this year said it was time to address Americans’ urgent and vital questions about geo-engineering and condensation trails.

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