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 administration tiptoes into testing prior authorization in traditional Medicare

Traditional Medicare plan holders have typically not had to wait for prior authorization before receiving medical treatment.

Until now.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced a new program to test prior authorization requirements for certain services in six states starting Jan. 1.

The states — New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, and Washington — will apply prior authorization evaluations to more than a dozen services.

CMS says the pilot program is intended to root out “fraud, waste, and abuse,” but as Medicare Advantage members know well, prior authorization can lead to frustrating delays in care.

How it works

CMS will contract with private companies to deploy “enhanced technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI)” to conduct the authorization reviews.

It won’t apply to in-patient or emergency services or treatments “that would pose a substantial risk to patients if significantly delayed,” according to a CMS press release. Specific services that will require prior authorization are skin and tissue substitutes, electrical nerve stimulator implants, and knee arthroscopy.

There is genuine concern about the costs of some of these items and services. A recent New York Times article highlighted pricey medical products, including paper-thin bandages made of dried bits of placenta, for Medicare patients.

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Biden-Appointed Judge Shockingly Rules Against Birthright Citizenship — Ninth Circuit Says Children of Foreign Diplomats Are NOT Automatically U.S. Citizens

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has just ruled that a man born in New York City in 1950 is NOT an American citizen.

The court affirmed what the Constitution’s framers and generations of Americans have always understood, the Fourteenth Amendment does not grant automatic citizenship to children born in the U.S. to foreign diplomats.

The case involved Roberto Moncada, who was born in New York City in 1950 while his father served as a Nicaraguan attaché at the United Nations.

For nearly seventy years, Moncada lived as an American, holding passports and even swearing oaths of allegiance multiple times.

But in 2018, after reviewing records, the government discovered that his father had served as an attaché, a diplomatic position that carried full immunity, not a simple consul as previously believed.

That detail changed everything. Under the Fourteenth Amendment, only those born “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States are citizens.

Children of foreign ministers and diplomats are explicitly excluded. Moncada’s father’s immunity meant his entire household, including his newborn son, was outside U.S. jurisdiction.

The court reviewed conflicting evidence, including records listing Moncada’s father as both “Deputy Consul” and “Attaché.” But after weighing the record, most importantly the State Department’s “Blue List” identifying him as an attaché with full diplomatic privileges, the panel concluded that the government had proved by clear and convincing evidence that Moncada was never a U.S. citizen

Moncada filed suit in 2019 to challenge that decision.

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Here’s A Pile Of Evidence Lockdowns Would Never Have Happened Without Corporate Media

Artificial intelligence may make books even more important, because they preserve a footnoted historical record that an AI-powered internet edits, erases, and obscures in real time. This is why I dedicate hard-earned family funds to buying physical books worth keeping, such as Sen. Rand Paul’s Deception: The Great Covid Cover-up.

Although a part of me wants to join many Americans in pretending lockdowns are all in a misty, distant past, I can’t do that, because to forget would dishonor the suffering. It would deliberately discard what we learned at so great a price. I want to see and preserve evidence of the evils our political class and Democrat voters continue to inflict. Remembering may be the only way to help prevent or dilute repeated mass psychoses.

This is why I read An Abundance of Caution, a book out in April by the left-leaning journalist David Zweig, who has bylines in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal. Zweig meticulously inspects a linchpin of the surreal U.S. lockdowns, extended school closures, against good evidence available not just weeks after they began but well before.

The End of Credential Credibility

Abundance of Caution documents how America’s disaster response disqualified the vast majority of America’s credentialed class. For example, three out of the four most accurate groups of people modeling Covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths were outside of the public health field. Several were “random” stats guys.

“A team from a management consulting firm, along with — to be frank, two random guys — McConnell and Karlen, outperformed teams of researchers from Johns Hopkins, MIT, Duke, Columbia, the University of Michigan, the famed IHME, and the US Department of Energy’s elite Los Alamos National Laboratory, among others.” Zweig writes. “It is hard to imagine a more damning indictment of public health ‘experts’ than this outcome.”

As a longtime fact-checker for major publications and a father of two children shut out of school, Zweig also had internal motivations to question his political tribe’s hysteria during a presidential election year.

“[S]chool policies emerge as a window into the larger conversation around COVID-19 and, broader still, a prism through which to approach fundamental questions about why and how individuals, bureaucracies, governments, and societies act as they do in times of crisis,” Zweig writes in his introduction. “Ultimately, this is not a book about COVID. It’s about a country ill-equipped to act sensibly under duress.”

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Israel launches attack on Gaza City

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has begun “the first stages” of an operation to take over Gaza City, a military spokesman has announced.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to seize the city in order to achieve full control of Gaza was approved by the Jewish state’s security cabinet two weeks ago.

IDF spokesman Brigadier General Effie Defrin said on Wednesday that Israeli forces are already “holding the outskirts of Gaza City” and will “deepen” attacks on Palestinian armed group Hamas in the densely populated area.

Netanyahu later said he had ordered the military to “shorten the timelines for seizing the last terror strongholds and for the defeat of Hamas.”

The IDF is expected to present its plan for the capture of Gaza City to the prime minister on Thursday, military sources have told local media. Earlier this week, the IDF announced it would be calling up another 60,000 reservists ahead of the operation.

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Leftists Admit They Can’t Win Without Rewriting The Constitution

Seldom does a headline simultaneously proclaim impotency and promise utter destruction, but The New York Times managed it: “Abolish the Senate. End the Electoral College. Pack the Court.”

To be fair, this was not an opinion piece per se but a partial transcript of an episode of Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast, where Douthat interviewed Osita Nwanevu, a contributing editor at The New Republic, a columnist at The Guardian, and a research fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. The occasion was Nwanevu’s first book, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding.

Nwanevu’s book is free of original argumentation. His example of why the Senate is “anti-democratic” is that California, a state that could be “one of the 40 largest countries in the world,” only has two senators, which gives a state like Wyoming “about 60, or more than 60, times the representation than people in California.”

And don’t try to say California’s 52-member delegation in the House of Representatives — the largest in the House by far — evens things out: “The Senate shapes the judiciary, it shapes the executive branch, and obviously, it’s a veto point for the passage of even ordinary legislation.” Thus, Nwanevu argues, “we have a fundamental piece of our system that flouts basic democratic principles.”

Never mind that the House originates all monied bills, or that all impeachments must originate in the House, or that House and Senate must both pass a bill before it sees the president’s desk.

His ideas for “saving democracy” are just as moldy. Create new states (his nominees, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., are the usual suspects). Stuff the Supreme Court. Have a national, popular vote for president. The same ideas the left has been repeating for years now. Nwanevu is just the latest parrot to sing the same song for the choir.

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SHOCKING: South Korean Police RAID Former Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn’s Party Office After He Dared to Question ELECTION FRAUD — Democracy Under Siege

South Korea, once hailed as a beacon of democracy in Asia, is now carrying out police raids on political opponents who dare raise questions about election fraud under the current pro-Chinese regime.

On August 20, armed police stormed the office of the Free and Innovation Party, led by former Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn, under the guise of investigating so-called “election law violations,” according to our contact in South Korea, Kim Yu-jin.

Hwang, along with hundreds of citizens organized under the Committee for Preventing Election Fraud, had officially registered as election monitors.

They followed legal procedures, participated transparently, and documented what they believed were serious irregularities. Instead of being commended for strengthening democracy, they are now being treated as criminals.

According to reports in the Herald Economy, the National Election Commission (NEC) filed complaints accusing Hwang and his group of “interfering” with elections, claiming they trained monitors on how to disrupt voting, induced invalid ballots, and even held rallies near polling places.

Police used those accusations as the basis for sweeping raids, ransacking offices and seizing materials.

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Concerns about solar encroachment on farmland grows as USDA pulls subsidies for new projects

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is pulling the plug on federal support of solar projects being developed on America’s farmland. The agency announced Tuesday that it would no longer provide taxpayer dollars for solar panels on productive farmland. 

“Our prime farmland should not be wasted and replaced with green-new-deal-subsidized solar panels,” Agriculture Secretary Brook Rollins said in the announcement. 

On-the-ground solar energy has some of the greatest land-use requirements of any energy source, coming in after hydroelectric and coal, if the latter’s mines are included. The huge swaths of land needed for solar farms make agricultural farmland attractive to developers. According to the USDA, within the last 30 years, Tennessee alone has lost over 1.2 million acres of farmland to solar farms, with another 2 million acres projected to be lost by 2027. 

“Tennesseans know that our farmland is our national security, our economic future, and our children’s heritage,” Tennessee GOP Governor Bill Lee said in a statement. 

While solar has seen explosive growth in the past few years, the Trump administration and Congress are cutting back on the subsidies that have been driving a lot of the development. Growth in the coming years could be slower. 

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How many illegals are in Ireland? Government has no idea

The State has admitted that “no official data exists” on the number of undocumented migrants currently resident in Ireland.

In response to questions from Gript this week, the Department of Justice confirmed that it has never conducted an analysis of the undocumented population, and that “irregular migration, by its very nature, is clandestine.”

This week Gript asked the Department of Justice three questions:

1. How many undocumented migrants are currently estimated to be present in Ireland?

2. How recent is this estimate and when was the last time the State did such an analysis?

3. By what methodology was that estimate reached?

The Department reapplied: “It is not possible to accurately quantify this figure.”

They added that in cases where individuals without immigration permission are encountered by An Garda Síochána, they are referred to the Department for action such as the issuing of a deportation order.

The admission comes despite the fact that, in 2022, then-Justice Minister Helen McEntee oversaw a “Regularisation of Long-Term Undocumented Migrants Scheme” which offered mass amnesty to those living illegally in the State without status long-term.

Between January and July 2022, the Government invited applications under the scheme from those meeting residency and character requirements, even allowing applicants who held live deportation orders to apply.

“You can apply for this scheme if you…have met the required residency criteria…are of good character and of good conduct, and have no adverse criminal record,” the official FAQ document stated.

The document also noted that “applications will be accepted for processing from applicants who hold a deportation order” provided other criteria were met.

The application fee was €550 for an individual and €700 for a family.

By August 2023, a total of 5,893 applications under the scheme had been determined. Of these, 4,710 were granted, 1,065 were refused, and 118 were withdrawn.

However, there are plausible reasons why other illegal migrants may not have applied for the scheme, such as cost, past criminal convictions, or fear of authorities.

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Bob’s blunders? Male inmate in women’s prison assaults female under WA governor’s trans policy

Bob Ferguson is the most unpopular Washington state governor in his first six months in more than 30 years, with fewer than one-in-three registered voters giving him “excellent” or “good” marks, according to a recent poll. 

The Democrat may be headed for even worse poll numbers in the wake of a new reported assault against a female inmate by a male inmate with a documented history of physical and sexual assault of both adult and child females, in and out of prison, whose placement in a women’s facility is possible under a gender identity policy Ferguson championed.

America First Policy Institute threatened to sue the Washington Department of Corrections and Washington Corrections Center for Women in an Aug. 13 letter if they do not “take immediate and concrete measures to protect the females in your custody” by revoking the “Transgender Inmate Policy and immediately removing all biological males from the facility.”

It posted a recording of the unidentified female inmate describing the alleged Aug. 7 assault by six-foot-four-inch Christopher Scott Williams, who reportedly pleaded guilty to “third-degree assault with sexual motivation” as a 16-year-old on his 9-year-old sister and was subsequently twice convicted for failing to register as a sex offender.

“She is an entire foot shorter than the male who attacked her,” AFPI senior attorney Leigh Ann O’Neill told Just the News, describing Williams’ accuser. O’Neill said the recording was edited down from “around 20 minutes” to just the portions where the female inmate “describes what happened” with Williams.

The Daily Caller News Foundation reported July 1 that Williams had been inexplicably transferred back to a male prison June 20, but the same inmate tracking system for victims now shows Williams – identified as female – was back in WCCW as of July 10. 

AFPI’s letter traces the brief removal to a lawsuit alleging Williams repeatedly violated his female cellmate Mozzy Clark three years ago, as documented in her ongoing lawsuit against the state, DOC and several officials.

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Mysterious Object Hurtling Toward Us From Beyond Solar System Appears to Be Emitting Its Own Light, Scientists Find

Last month, astronomers made an exciting discovery, observing an interstellar object — only the third ever observed — hurtling toward the center of the solar system.

The object, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, has caught the attention of Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who has a long track record of making controversial predictions about previous interstellar objects being relics from an extraterrestrial civilization.

While there’s been a growing consensus among astronomers that the latest object is a comet, Loeb has continued to entertain the idea that it may have been sent to us by an intelligent species from outside of the solar system — and he’s far from backing down.

In a blog post over the weekend, Loeb pointed to observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which showed a “glow of light, likely from a coma, ahead of the motion of 3I/ATLAS towards the Sun.”

A coma is the hazy and luminous cloud that surrounds the nucleus of a comet.

However, there’s “no evidence for a bright cometary tail in the opposite direction,” he wrote, with scientists suggesting it was evidence that dust was evaporating from the object’s Sun-facing side.

The observations led Loeb and his colleagues to an intriguing, albeit far-fetched possibility: is the mysterious space object generating “its own light?”

After deliberations with his colleague and Harvard astrophysicist Eric Keto, Loeb suggested that the “simplest interpretation” of 3I/ATLAS’ observed “steep brightness profile” is that its nucleus “produces most of the light.”

That would also mean that its actual size is much smaller than currently thought, roughly in line with the size of the first two interstellar objects we’ve observed, ‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov.

The Harvard astronomer suggested two possibilities: either 3I/ATLAS is naturally emitting radiation because its a “rare fragment from the core of a nearby supernova that is rich in radioactive material” — or it’s a “spacecraft powered by nuclear energy, and the dust emitted from its frontal surface might be from dirt that accumulated on its surface during its interstellar travel.”

Loeb deemed the former explanation “highly unlikely,” and the latter as requiring “better evidence to be viable.”

Loeb previously argued that the object’s unusual trajectory — which includes suspiciously close flybys of both Earth and Jupiter — and its lack of a visible tail both undermine the theory that it’s a comet.

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