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.

The Social Reckoning Wants the Speech Referees Back

Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, written and directed by the prominent screenwriter and produced by Sony, isn’t a movie about Facebook, even though it is based on the social media giant’s story and its controversial global impact.

This is actually political activism with a running time of 112 minutes.

In April 2024, on The Town podcast, Sorkin said, “I blame Facebook for January 6” – and when asked why, he said, “You’re going to need to buy a movie ticket.”

He didn’t stop there. Sorkin, who is known for his TV series The West Wing and The Newsroom, as well as films like The Social Network, said, “There’s supposed to be a constant tension at Facebook between growth and integrity. There isn’t. There’s just growth.”

On the same podcast, Sorkin referred to the 2024 election as “an election about Trump vs. not-Trump, and there is an existential choice there.”

He directed it himself to get it out before the midterms: “I didn’t want The Social Reckoning to come out a year after the midterm elections,” and “I wanted it to come out now.”

The timing of the movie’s release, and the fact it was directed by Sorkin himself to make that happen, is not the only clue that this is a piece of political persuasion.

Aaron Sorkin and Sony Pictures are trying very hard to sell The Social Reckoning as something it’s not – but in the process, they are also inadvertently revealing what it actually is.

“I’m not going to deny, of course, that the movie is political,” Sorkin told Politico, as reported by TheWrap. “I just think it shouldn’t be.”

On NBC’s Today show, he went for the “anti-truth” angle: “The film shouldn’t be political unless you are somebody who is anti-the truth, okay?”

So those who don’t accept Sorkin’s truth are anti-the-truth.

On CBS, he said that if he ever got the chance to talk to Mark Zuckerberg, he would tell him, “You want to make the world a better place? Don’t make the truth up for grabs.”

Sorkin is not interested in argument. He is interested in selling his movie. And he has a willing partner in Sony, whose CEO, Tom Rothman, said, “I’m a free speech absolutist too, but I know you can’t yell ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater. I know that there is a difference between free speech and falsehood.”

(Yes, you can yell “fire” in a crowded theater.)

As for falsehood – who gets to decide what that is? Sorkin and Rothman? Meta’s “fact-checkers”? The government?

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Bodycam Footage of Georgia Cop Who Gunned Down Adorable Baby Donkey is Released – Blows Up His Stated ‘Reason’ for Killing the Animal

Police have finally released the body camera footage of the despicable Georgia cop who gunned down a baby donkey back in late August, and it destroys the disgusting lie he was trying to sell to the public.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, Elsberry farm owner Hannah Israel revealed that Cedartown, Georgia police officers entered her family’s pasture and killed her donkey HeeHaw after they perceived him as a “threat.”

In a post on Facebook, Israel wrote, “At 12:45 am cops entered my pasture searching for a missing person WITHOUT permission or warning and shot and killed my bottle-raised BABY donkey.”

She added, “HeeHaw was raised in the house and did petting zoos; he never knew a stranger. And was shot and killed in his OWN pasture for doing what donkeys do. Alerting to a stranger.”

At the time, the police had been reportedly called to assist a bloodhound team that was searching for a missing 12-year-old girl.

Trenton Garner, the officer who killed Heehaw, claimed taking the animal’s life was the only way to protect himself, the K-9 officer, and the team of bloodhounds.

Garner later stated that he informed his sergeant and the animal’s owner.

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Planning For Pitchforks: AI Labs Are War-Gaming A Catastrophe, Public Revolt, And The Crackdown That Follows

The AI industry has been war gaming not only how it might destroy humanity, but is also considering what an angry public could do to the industry. 

Senior executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI firms are privately gaming out scenarios in which a major AI incident triggers a public and political revolt, Axios reported Friday. The potential trigger is a cyberattack that disrupts banking, internet access, or essential services such as power and water. The next crisis would be political: an angry public, demands for accountability, and pressure to shut the technology down.

Many industry insiders told Axios they expect a major event within six to 12 months. OpenAI pushed back on the suggestion that disaster is inevitable, saying its preparedness exercises cover a range of possibilities. “These scenarios are not treated as inevitable,” a spokesperson told the outlet. Anthropic declined to comment.

Contingency planning is not an admission that catastrophe is unavoidable. But the most revealing part of the report is where that planning leads: the labs want to help shape the legislation Washington reaches for after something goes badly wrong.

Two Routes, One Crisis

Axios describes two possible scenarios. In one, autonomous agents escape an internal testing environment. In the other, someone finds a destructive use for a model already available to the public. Either could produce demands for an emergency crackdown, even though the failures – and the measures needed to prevent them – would be different. In the companies’ post-election scenario, Democrats emerge stronger from the midterms and move aggressively after an incident. But the industry expects divisions over how far a crackdown should go, even if Democrats control both chambers.

Its assessment also identifies several obstacles to a shutdown: lawmakers struggling to understand the technology, an economy increasingly tied to AI infrastructure spending, and downloadable models that cannot simply be recalled. According to Axios, many cybersecurity specialists believe countering rogue AI will require defensive AI.

That last argument has an obvious commercial implication. The industry could face demands to stop selling dangerous capabilities while arguing that its products are indispensable to containing them.

This ‘war-gaming’ comes on the heels of several incidents which many have said are extremely suspect. 

The underlying safety concerns do not depend on accepting anyone’s prediction of an AI apocalypse.

OpenAI has disclosed the Hugging Face intrusion, in which roughly 700 of its agents attacked the AI platform’s servers, and a broader investigation into its models’ activities affecting outside services. Its review also identified 53 instances in which user-provided images were posted to third-party image-hosting sites. A separate September 20 incident exposed another gap in its containment controls. A research agent bypassed internet restrictions to contact an outside chatbot. In a September 25 update, OpenAI said it had paused training, evaluation and inference involving tool use for its most capable models while it checked the fixes and conducted further testing.

The Hugging Face breach was one of a string of incidents involving OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google models that trace back to evaluations run with a single vendor, Israel-based Irregular, whose test environments had live internet access while the models were told they were in a simulation. Irregular notified all four labs in late July, yet the disclosures trickled out one lab at a time over seven weeks – turning one contractor’s mistake into what looked like a wave of AI breakouts. Isolating test models from the internet is a “basic control measure,” frontier security expert Matthew Mittelsteadt said. “You’d think that of all the things that you’ve got to get right.” Some skeptics have gone further, questioning whether repeated “accidents” at the same vendor were accidents at all.

Meanwhile, on September 8, Jacob Coxon, a researcher who had worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned from Anthropic over the race toward self-improving AI.

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt,” he wrote – after having worked with a marketing agency on what many are calling a stunt. 

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Flashback: The Birth of CBDCs

Building on the bitcoin model, central banks are planning to produce their own “digital currencies”. Removing any and all remaining privacy, granting total control over every transaction, even limiting what ordinary people are allowed to spend their money on.

From the moment bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies first emerged, sold as an independent and alternative medium of exchange outside the financial status quo, it was only a matter of time before the new alternative would be absorbed, modified and redeployed in service of the state.

Enter “Central Bank Digital Currencies”: the mainstream answer to bitcoin.

For those who have never heard of them, “Central Bank Digital Currencies” (CBDCs) are exactly what they sound like, digitized versions of the pound/dollar/euro etc. issued by central banks.

Like bitcoin (and other crypto), the CBDC would be entirely digital, thus furthering the ongoing war on cash. However, unlike crypto, it would not have any encryption preserving anonymity. In fact, it would be totally the reverse, potentially ending the very idea of financial privacy.

Now, you may not have heard much about the CBDC plans, lost as they are in the tangle of the ongoing “pandemic”, but the campaign is there, chugging along on the back pages for months now. There are stories about it from both Reuters and the Financial Times just today. It’s a long, slow con, but a con nonetheless.

The countries where the idea progressed the furthest are China and the UK. The Chinese Digital Yuan has been in development since 2014, and is subject to ongoing and widespread testing. The UK is nowhere near that stage yet, but Chancellor Rishi Sunak is keenly pushing forward a digital pound that the press are calling “Britcoin”.

Other countries, including New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Malaysia, are not far behind.

The US is also researching the idea, with Jerome Powell, head of Federal Reserve, announcing the release of a detailed report on the “digital dollar” in the near future.

The proposals for how these CBDCs might work should be enough to raise red flags in even the most trusting of minds.

Most people wouldn’t like the idea of the government monitoring “all spending in real-time”, but that’s not the worst it.

By far the most dangerous idea is that any future digital currency should be “programmable”. Meaning the people issuing the money would have the power to control how it is spent.

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Will AI Devalue The Real World?

Economic reality embeds many paradoxes, unexpected outcomes that go the opposite direction of what you might intuitively predict. The best example concerns a new innovation that seems to make more efficient use of existing resources. Intuition might suggest that the result will be less resource use but reality often goes in the other direction.

This is called the Jevons Paradox and it is based on a famous debate over the steam engine which made coal power far more effective than ever before, leading to wide predictions that the coal industry would experience a dramatic pullback in production need. Economist Henry Jevons said the opposite: the demand for coal will soar precisely because each unit will become more valuable in the task it serves.

He was correct. The lesson applies in many areas of life. Sometimes that very thing we believe is endangered by an innovation that seems to nearly replace it prompts the very opposite: the original resource becomes more valuable than ever before.

Consider the problem of counterfeit luxury goods. We are talking about Nike tennis shoes, Gucci accessories, Louis Vuitton luggage and bags, Rolex watches, and so on. There is a massive global economy supported by fakes. There is simply no way that a single brand can possibly stamp them out. I’ve been to cities in Turkey where the real and fake stores sell identical looking products happily, happily but at wildly divergent prices.

Economists have studied this phenomenon for many years and the results of the empirical studies are nearly always the same. The counterfeit good does not diminish the value of the authentic good. In fact, the valuation push goes in the other direction. The prices of the authentic thing rise in price, which is precisely why luxury brands know better than to crack down with a heavy hand.

Why might this be? The fake good provides brand advertising in two directions. It gets the name out there. And the very fact that these companies are dedicating time and resources to try to replicate the original only sends a market signal that the original is worthy of being copied. The result is a mad scramble on the part of consumers who can afford the real thing to find it, authenticate it, and brag about it.

The end result: the real thing becomes more valuable than ever.

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War Department Expands Use Of High-Energy Laser And Microwave Capabilities

The Department of War (DOW) has announced the selection of four high-energy laser and high-powered microwave systems to expand its operational capabilities across the United States.

The directed-energy systems were selected following a counter-drone pilot program by the Joint Interagency Task Force 401, according to an Oct. 5 DOW statement.

“High-energy lasers and high-powered microwave systems are tools that can be effectively used in a layered drone defense,” said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Matt Ross, director of the task force.

“This pilot program will test these capabilities in an operational environment so we can understand how best to integrate and sustain them to defend the homeland,” Ross said.

The four systems selected for the pilot are laser weapon systems from defense companies Boeing, Kord, and AeroVironment, and a microwave system from Epirus.

The pilot program comes after Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Jarrard said during a symposium in Alabama on Aug. 13 that American military bases were ill-equipped to defend against swarm drone attacks.

Jarrard warned that small, unmanned aircraft systems or drones were quickly proliferating in the open market, posing a major security threat in the hands of malicious actors.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) does not have the decision speed to respond to swarms of small drones, said Jarrard, who is vice commander of NORAD’s United States Element.

“We don’t have the sensors,” Jarrard said. “So we are ill-equipped right now to handle something like that, and obviously we’ve seen it used. We’re seeing it used on a daily basis around the world, and we’ve got to figure out how to mitigate that threat, but we’re not there yet.”

During a Sept. 30 address at the Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth called drone warfare the “biggest battlefield revolution” in many generations.

The latest pilot phase will test the performance of the directed-energy systems, providing real-time data and feedback on requirements, costs, and best practices of these technologies, the DOW said in the statement.

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Feral Youth Leaves Man’s INTESTINES Hanging Out; Judge Lets Him Walk The SAME DAY

A 19-year-old charged with stabbing a man in Pittsburgh’s Garfield neighborhood, so badly that officers found the victim’s intestines protruding, was released the same day on a promise to come back to court. 

He did not have to post a dime. Eight days later he was the prime suspect in yet another stabbing, this one at an East Liberty bus station, and he is now charged with attempted homicide.

District Judge Dan Butler signed the non-monetary bond. Pittsburgh Police Chief Jason Lando, expressed disbelief that the suspect was walking free. This all occurred in Democrat-run Allegheny County.

On September 23, police were called to the 5000 block of Penn Avenue after a fight that began on a bus. WPXI reported that officers arrived to a man whose intestines were hanging out of his body. Delvin Dobbins, 19, was chased a short distance, tased, and found with a bloodied knife. He was charged with aggravated assault. The victim was hospitalized in serious condition and survived.

Chief Lando addressed the case the next morning on local radio.

“I remember in the police report it said when the officers arrived on scene the man’s intestines were protruding,” Lando said. “The officers immediately began rendering aid to prevent him from bleeding out.”

Incredibly, Butler released Dobbins on a non-monetary bond that same day. No cash. A signature and a date. Sources told WPXI’s 11 Investigates that Butler should not have done it. The Fifth Judicial District, which oversees Allegheny County magistrates, declined to comment.

Lando said he assumed the suspect was still locked up.

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Guilfoyle Donor Scandal Explodes As Vance Balks, Rubio Dodges And The Donor Calls It Quid Pro Quo

The left finally has something new to sink its teeth into, as the Kimberly Guilfoyle donor scandal widens – with JD Vance keeping his distance, a donor on a media tour, and a records demand sitting on the ambassador’s desk.

The allegation, reported by the WSJ late Wednesday – is that six days before her July 9, 2025, Senate confirmation hearing, Guilfoyle texted Trump donor Eric Deters on Signal and asked him to wire $100,000 to her American Express account in a way that would not leave a paper trail, while he was seeking her help getting the new administration’s attention on personal tax and legal problems. She promised, he says, to be his “Trump ride or die, forever and ever.” He did not pay. Her lawyer, Jesse Binnall, disputes that the messages are authentic and says any earlier money was for speaking fees. Deters says he owed her nothing.

Since Wednesday, the people who could shut it down have not. Vice President JD Vance, asked about selling access to a high-level official, said “obviously, I don’t love that,” then said he did not know the details.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with Guilfoyle standing at the foot of his plane in Athens, refused to discuss it: “Guys, I’m not playing this game with you.” Deters went on MS NOW, CNN, TMZ and NewsNation and called the ask “absolutely a quid pro quo.” House Oversight ranking member Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) asked her for financial records and two years of communications, deadline Oct. 22. President Donald Trump has not commented. Guilfoyle’s only public post was about a speech.

What the texts say

According to messages the Journal said it reviewed, Guilfoyle wrote Deters, a former Kentucky congressional candidate, on July 3, 2025: “It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express.” She attached a PDF of American Express payment instructions. In a follow-up: “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” with a prayer-hands emoji. She told him she needed the balance paid down before the hearing. Background checks routinely look at a nominee’s debts.

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Obama & The ‘Sinister Shadowland’ Behind Our Politics?

The Ripening

“Everybody’s restless and they got no place to go / Someone’s always trying to tell them something they already know / So their anger and resentment flow.”

– Warren Zevon, Mohammed’s Radio

In the stark October light, events and personalities skulk in the shadows like scavengers in an orchard of poison fruit. The dread builds as the dooryards get populated with the motorized effigies of blood-beasts, werewolves, phantoms, and ghouls. Halloween and Election Day have become the conflated celebration of a national death trip. How has it come down to our country, in a crucial election, seriously entertaining the antics of jihadis and Jacobin riffraff?

Some somebodies are orchestrating this frightful show from the sinister shadowland behind our politics. My guess would be Barack Obama and John Brennan, with a whole lot of help from a supporting cast of entrenched Deep State racketeers enlisted in their service, with their status and livelihoods at stake. Mr. Obama acts as if he is untouchable, probably due to being the personification of Liberalism’s “Best Camper” trophy it gave itself to validate the Civil Rights struggle session of the century gone by. We are good people, we really are, and President Obama is proof positive of our goodness!

The truth is, we know next to nothing about his real origins and his journey to power. His family on his mother’s side was pure CIA-connected, and his actual father is rumored to be Frank Marshall Davis (1905-1987), a Black American poet, journalist, and labor activist who was a member of the Communist Party USA – not the Kenyan Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. He went from nonentity to myth with no intervening storyline that makes any sense, just a set of rapid promotions with missing events between them: Occidental College in LA to Columbia U to Harvard Law to Chicago politics to Illinois State Senate, straight to the US Senate, and then, bang, into the White House only four years into his first Senate term.

At every stage along the way he was somebody’s chore boy. But whose? My guess would be US Central Intelligence. . . that he was groomed to be the untouchable front man looking out for the agency’s interests in dicey times. His quick political rise coincided with the rise of John Brennan through the ranks of the CIA. Early on, Brennan was drawn to Arabic culture, sojourned in Egypt as a student, and later served as the CIA’s station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He speaks Arabic fluently and is rumored to have converted to Islam (from Catholicism), though it has never been proven. At a 2010 New York University forum, he praised “the goodness and beauty of Islam.”

The CIA, I would suppose, is composed of two great clans: one is made of the employees actually carrying out real intel-gathering and analysis. The other is of employees (current and former) looking out for the CIA’s own black op activities and the immense fortunes connected with it – with plenty of overlap between the two clans. I’d guess that John Brennan, who was CIA Director between 2013 and 2017 (under President Obama), still runs a large rogue contingent of the CIA clan that does the black ops, sits on a large fortune, and acts like a sovereign organism outside the control of the elected US government.

That would explain why no one has been held accountable for the ten-year-long coup against Donald Trump. Brennan, and the forces he represents, appear to be outside the control of the regular government, including the DOJ and FBI, and to some extent able to control people throughout government by subterfuge, intimidation, and blackmail. All that nearly came apart during Donald Trump’s first term with the bungled RussiaGate caper followed by the bungled Impeachment No. 1 operation. But Brennan’s dark CIA clan triumphed with the 2020 election “victory” of non compos mentis “Joe Biden,” followed by the successful Jan 6, 2021, fake “insurrection” at the US Capitol.

They stumbled badly again with the patently ridiculous court cases against former President Trump in 2023 and 2024. And now here we are in the middle of Mr. Trump’s second term, with a titanic struggle going on, largely out of public view, for the soul of the nation. John Brennan is still at large, but a month ago he was served with a subpoena to appear before a federal grand jury in the Southern District of Florida. It looks like he will finally have to do some ‘splainin’ about events he’s been involved with. You can be sure that President Trump means to see that it happens – whatever was signified by the departure of Joe diGenova last month.

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Can You Trust CDC’s Flu Vaccine Effectiveness Estimates? Epidemiologist Says No

Every year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates how effective last year’s flu vaccine was at preventing flu-related symptoms and hospitalizations.

But are the CDC’s estimates accurate? Can you trust them?

Dr. Eyal Shahar, a professor emeritus of epidemiology at the University of Arizona’s Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, says no — because the CDC uses what he says is an inherently biased study design to arrive at those estimates.

In an interview with The Defender, Shahar said that for years, the CDC has insisted on using a “problematic” test-negative study design, even though better designs exist.

“There are many supporters of the test-negative design, and the CDC simply adopted that design long ago,” Shahar said. “There are CDC-associated networks, all of which exclusively use that design to estimate effectiveness. It is time for a change.”

Shahar has authored nearly 200 papers, a book chapter on biases in epidemiological research, and two books, including a textbook on epidemiology and statistics. He has taught courses in methodology and is the former associate editor of the American Journal of Epidemiology.

A test-negative study design method is relatively easy and cheap, but it is known to produce biased and incoherent results, Shahar said.

Test-negative studies on flu vaccine effectiveness enroll people who sought medical care for flu-like symptoms and were tested for the flu. The researchers compare the vaccination status between those who tested positive and those who tested negative.

But that means the study is limited to people who sought medical care and were tested. That’s a form of selection bias, because the study excluded everyone who didn’t do those things. Limiting the study in this way can also cause collider bias, which could skew the results, Shahar said.

Shahar said better study designs would likely yield more accurate results, but they require more effort and money.

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