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.

War Becomes Spectacle in Trump’s Horrific Propaganda Promoting War in Iran

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to be an antiwar candidate, boasting that, unlike his predecessors, he would end endless wars and keep the United States out of new military conflicts. Yet the trajectory of his presidency has unfolded in the opposite direction. From expanding military confrontations in the Caribbean to the escalating war with Iran, launched through large-scale strikes that risk igniting a wider regional catastrophe, Trump’s rule has increasingly relied on the language and machinery of war. As Zachary Basu points out in Axios, “he has attacked seven nations [and] authorized more individual air strikes in 2025 than President Biden did in four years.”

What makes this moment particularly disturbing is not only the violence itself, but also the way it is staged and celebrated. As the conflict with Iran intensified, the White House circulated promotional videos that fused real footage of bombing raids with visuals drawn from video games and action films, transforming acts of destruction into a spectacle of national triumph. In such images, war appears not as tragedy or political catastrophe but as thrilling display, inviting viewers to admire the technological performance of power while remaining detached from the human suffering it produces. These spectacles are more than crude propaganda. They reveal a deeper shift in political culture in which violence is aestheticized, cruelty normalized, and militarism staged as entertainment, training the public to experience domination not as a catastrophe but as an exhilarating display of power.

We live in an age of monsters. More than two centuries ago, Francisco Goya captured such a moment in his haunting 1799 etching, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” an image that now reads less like a relic of the Enlightenment than a prophecy of our own time. The Italian political thinker Antonio Gramsci described moments like this as periods of historical crisis, writing that “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Our present moment bears all the marks of such an interregnum.

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Rocket scientist and Air Force general linked to UFOs vanish under similar strange circumstances five months apart

A retired Air Force general known in UFO circles has gone missing during a hike in New Mexico, just months after a former colleague disappeared in a nearly identical case. 

US Major General William Neil McCasland, 68, was last seen on the morning of February 27 as he left his Albuquerque home with only a backpack, wallet and .38-caliber revolver for a trail run, according to the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office.

Sources previously told The New York Post that McCasland was a ‘gatekeeper’ and ‘participant’ in the UFO community.

His disappearance has only fueled speculation around the disappearance of 60-year-old Monica Reza, who had worked on a rocket project overseen by McCasland, who also went missing in June 2025. 

In a chillingly similar case, Reza was last seen hiking in a California forest with a colleague, smiling and waving moments before she ‘vanished off the face of the earth,’ according to NewsNation. 

For months, authorities and volunteers have combed the area using every resource at their disposal, but the aerospace engineer remains missing without a trace. 

At a recent press conference, Sheriff John Allen said a Silver Alert was issued for McCasland after reports of a ‘mental fog’ in the months before his disappearance, adding that he had no other known health problems. 

Yet despite an intensive search involving drones, helicopters, ground crews and K-9 units, the avid outdoorsman – and any trace of his belongings – also remains missing. 

‘Let me be straight. We’ve had a lot of tips, and we will go through every tip. But there are some tips with some outlandish theories, conspiracy theories,’ the sheriff said.

‘We will look into everything, but we are trying as a law enforcement agency and entity,’ he added.

The general’s wife, Susan McCasland, posted on Facebook to set the record straight amid what she described as ‘misinformation’ about her husband’s disappearance. 

‘It is true that Neil had a brief association with the UFO community,’ she wrote. ‘This connection is not a reason for someone to abduct Neil.

‘Though at this point with absolutely no sign of him, maybe the best hypothesis is that aliens beamed him up to the mothership. However, no sightings of a mothership hovering above the Sandia Mountains have been reported.’

Just nine months ago, Reza – known professionally as Monica Jacinto at Aerojet Rocketdyne as a material scientist – was last seen hiking on the popular Mount Waterman Trail in the Angeles National Forest in Los Angeles. 

Like McCasland, she loved hiking. She was just 30ft behind the man she was with when she vanished on what was described as a ‘normal day,’ according to NewsNation.

‘He turned around, next thing you know, she was just completely gone,’ the outlet reported.

‘Rescue teams spent days looking for her, but actually never recovered her body.’

Reza worked for Aerojet Rocketdyne, a high-profile company funded for years by NASA and the Air Force Research Laboratory, according to SpaceNews.

In the 1990s, she engineered a nickel-based superalloy that could survive extreme oxygen environments without added weight – technology that helped create the AR1 engine, set to replace Russian RD-180 engines on United Launch Alliance rockets. 

Her patented invention brought her into McCasland’s sphere, as he oversaw the Air Force group that funded early-2000s research on advanced materials for reusable spacecraft and weapons systems. 

McCasland’s Air Force biography reveals he oversaw advanced materials as director of the Space Vehicle Directorate’s materials wing and commanded the Phillips Research Site at Kirtland Air Force Base from 2001 to 2004.

His roles ultimately had a direct connection to Reza’s highly successful research. 

The general had also led research at Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which Marik Von Rennenkampff, a former Obama-era national security analyst, described as ‘where all the super-secret research happens,’ CNN reported. 

On the day he vanished, McCasland spoke with a repair person at his home at 10am, while his wife left around an hour later for a medical appointment, the sheriff’s office said. 

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Modern humans arrived in Australia 60,000 years ago and may have interbred with archaic humans such as ‘hobbits’

A new study of nearly 2,500 genomes may have finally settled the debate about when modern humans arrived in Australia. Using a diverse database of DNA from ancient and contemporary Aboriginal people throughout Oceania, researchers have determined that people began to settle northern Australia by 60,000 years ago and that they arrived via two distinct routes.

Experts have long debated the date that humans first arrived in Australia, a feat that required the invention of watercraft. While some researchers have used genetic models to support a “short chronology” of 47,000 to 51,000 years ago for the arrival, others have marshaled archaeological evidence and Aboriginal knowledge in support of the “long chronology,” in which the first arrivals happened 60,000 to 65,000 years ago.

In the new study, published Friday (Nov. 28) in the journal Science Advances, researchers analyzed an “unprecedentedly large” dataset of 2,456 human genomes to answer the question of when humans journeyed from Sunda (the ancient landmass, also known as Sundaland, that included what are today Indonesia, the Philippines and the Malaysian Peninsula) to Sahul (a paleocontinent that included modern-day Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea).

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The Feds Are Investing in Wearable Health Trackers. That Could Put Your Private Data at Risk.

By gathering continuous data about sleep, heart rate, and physical activity, biowearable devices can give individuals more control over their well-being. But they also create a detailed digital record of our daily lives—one that the federal government may soon be able to access readily.

Consider this scenario.

You’ve recently received a government-subsidized biowearable. Accordingly, the authorities now know when you’re sleeping, because the device reports your sleep cycle, location, and daily movements in real time to a cloud server accessible through a legal process. It knows when you’re home. It knows when you leave.

Those data are then obtained by an FBI field office (either through direct purchase or, if necessary, a legal process), because a federal prosecutor has decided that your criticism of immigration enforcement operations and your social media posts supporting Immigration and Customs Enforcement protesters constitute “incitement to violence” against federal agents. Under the Trump administration’s elastic (and legally dubious) domestic terrorism definitions and designations, that is enough to open a criminal investigation.

And because the government has known for weeks when you’re at home sleeping, it knows exactly when to break down your door.

That scenario may sound far-fetched, but it is getting closer to reality. In March, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) would begin investing in new biowearable technologies through a program it called Delphi, after the ancient Greek sanctuary where the maxim “know thyself” was inscribed. It’s a fitting name for a program designed to help people understand their bodies, but it also raises an uncomfortable question: Who else might come to know them just as well?

The program aims to develop biosensors capable of continuously monitoring cytokines (cellular inflammation markers) and hormone levels, going substantially beyond what current wearables can detect. Funding will be determined on a competitive basis as private-sector stakeholders submit proposals; no specific appropriation has been announced.

It remains unclear why this taxpayer funding is necessary in a field that is already thriving. The global wearables market was valued at roughly $43 billion in 2024 and is projected to exceed $168 billion by 2030.

Devices worn on the wrist, finger, or skin can already monitor heart rates, blood oxygen levels, sleep patterns, physical activity, and—in the case of continuous glucose monitors—blood sugar levels in real time. Some smartwatches can even conduct electrocardiograms capable of detecting irregular heart rhythms, such as atrial fibrillation.

Until recently, people could access most of this information only during periodic visits to a clinic or hospital. Biowearables now enable people to monitor many of these signals continuously in everyday life.

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Controversial Study Challenges Age of Famous Monte Verde Site, Reigniting One of Archaeology’s Greatest Debates

It began like many archaeological discoveries in the Americas: woodcutters working along the banks of Chinchihuapi Creek, a tributary of the Maullín River about 36 miles from the Pacific coast of southern Chile near Puerto Montt, observed the bones of very large animals protruding from an eroded bank.

The investigations that followed, however, beginning in the 1970s at what became known as the Monte Verde archaeological site, revealed more than just the dwelling place of some of Chile’s earliest residents. Findings there, including radiocarbon dates indicating a human presence as early as 14,500 years ago, led to a controversy that shook the foundations of American anthropology, upending past thinking on not only who had been the first to arrive at sites like this one—now a proposed UNESCO World Heritage Site—but more fundamentally, whether people initially migrated into the Americas far earlier than previously ever imagined.

For many years, the debate over whether sites like Monte Verde provided unequivocal evidence that there were people in the New World prior to the appearance of the Clovis culture—long recognized as the oldest confirmed cultural manifestation in the Americas, and dating to no earlier than around 13,500 years ago—remained one of American archaeology’s most challenging questions.

With time, however, and a growing number of similar discoveries at sites in North and South America that would follow, the debate appeared to have been settled: pre-Clovis had become the accepted paradigm, and the scientific data first uncovered by archaeologist Tom Dillehay, Ph.D, at Monte Verde clearly showed it.

However, that doesn’t mean there haven’t been a few holdouts who continue to argue that the once widely accepted “Clovis horizon” may still be closer to the mark, in terms of when the first large-scale migrations into the Americas began. While their numbers have diminished somewhat within the 21st century, some archaeologists like Dr. Todd Surovell, a Professor and Department Head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wyoming, have kept the debate alive by challenging what he and a few colleagues view as a kind of new orthodoxy that has slowly emerged out of what was once considered a fringe idea in American archaeology.

Now, as evidenced by a recent study by Surovell and several co-authors published in Science, not only is the debate still burning after many decades, but the enigmatic Monte Verde archaeological site appears to have maintained its place at the center of the controversy.

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Is ‘vibe physics’ the future?

At the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in Denver, a session on “Navigating the AI revolution: future-proofing your science career” drew in a crowd of early-stage physicists searching for practical career advice. What they received was much more philosophical in nature.

Malachi Schram of the Pacific Northwest National Lab and Hilary Egan of the National Laboratory of the Rockies delivered back-to-back talks full of similar rhetoric, emphasizing the fast-paced development of AI used for specialized tasks in science, such as detecting equipment failure or identifying ways of retrofitting older buildings.

But the third speaker, Matthew Schwartz, a theoretical physicist from Harvard University, took his optimism about AI far further. In a punchy presentation, he predicted that large language models (LLMs) will surpass human intelligence in five years.

“There’s definitely exponential growth of the intellectual capacity of these [large language] models as a function of time,” Schwartz told the audience, using the number of model parameters as a proxy for intelligence. “The machines are still growing by roughly 10 times each year, and we” – he paused for dramatic effect – “are not growing much smarter.” This drew a wave of laughter from the crowd.

Unlike humans, machines can visualize higher dimensional spaces, hold far more information in memory and process more complex equations. “We are not the endpoint of intelligence. We are only the smartest things to evolve on Earth so far,” Schwartz argued. He went on to suggest that humans may simply be incapable of understanding long-standing physics problems such as a theory of everything. He compared it to cats, which he suggested will never understand chess.

If the talent of physicists exists on a bell curve, Schwartz claims we can push the bell curve higher on the talent axis: “If we use AI augmentation, we can get 10 000 Einsteins a century instead of one Einstein.”

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Trump is strategizing means to seize Iran’s nuclear stockpiles, sources say

The Trump administration has been strategizing methods and options to secure or extract Iran’s nuclear materials, according to multiple people briefed on the discussions, as a U.S.-Israel-led military campaign against Tehran enters a more uncertain phase. 

The timing of any such an operation — if President Trump were to order it — remained unclear Friday night. One source said he has made no decision yet. 

But planning has centered on the possible deployment of forces from the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, the elite military unit often tasked with the most sensitive counter-proliferation missions, two of the sources told CBS News. 

A White House spokeswoman said it’s the Pentagon’s job to make preparations.

A spokesperson for the Pentagon didn’t immediately comment. 

Mr. Trump in a Truth Social post Friday evening said: “We are getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great Military efforts in the Middle East with respect to the Terrorist Regime of Iran.”

The private deliberations on the nuclear material come amid an evolving conflict that in its opening focused on degrading Iran’s conventional military capabilities — including air defenses, missile systems and key infrastructure tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. 

That initial wave of strikes carried out by U.S. and Israeli forces was intended to blunt Iran’s ability to retaliate across the region. However, despite the onslaught from the air, Iran has been able to counterstrike on Israel and U.S.-allied countries in the Gulf region, and has halted most oil shipments by threatening ships. 

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Mystery of Kurt Cobain’s death deepens as new handwriting analysis points to forged suicide note found at the scene

A suicide note impaled with a red pen into the soil of a potted plant was long believed to be Kurt Cobain’s final message to the world. 

The Nirvana frontman died on April 5, 1994, at age 27 from a shotgun wound at his Seattle home. The King County Medical Examiner ruled his death a suicide.

Written in red pen on a restaurant placemat, the note was one of the key pieces of evidence cited by Seattle Police in their conclusion that Cobain took his own life.

Now, a private forensic team has claimed that the final lines of the note, where Cobain appears to bid farewell to his wife and daughter, may have been written by someone else.

Those lines read: ‘Please keep going Courtney,’ ‘for Frances,’ ‘for her life which will be so much happier,’ ‘without me,’ followed by ‘I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU.’

Independent researcher Michelle Wilkins, who worked with the team, told Daily Mail: ‘If you look closely, the handwriting in the last four lines is different, larger and more scrawled. We don’t believe Kurt wrote those lines.’

By contrast, the top of the note, addressed to Cobain’s imaginary childhood friend ‘Boddah,’ reads like a farewell to the music world rather than a personal message to his family: ‘I’ve tried everything… I’ve tried to get what I wanted out of life, and it just hasn’t worked.’

Handwriting analyst Mozelle Martin claimed that the last lines were written by someone else, citing changes in letter formation and rhythm, though her findings have not been peer-reviewed. 

Martin said she conducted her analysis to see the Kurt Cobain case officially reopened by Seattle Police as a homicide investigation, not a suicide.

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UK: Transgender Pedophile Spared Prison After Being Caught With Sexual Abuse Images Of Children As Young As 6

A trans-identified male who was caught with images of young children being sexually abused has walked free from court after being given a community order. Tyler “Kairah” Kelly, 25, was formerly promoted as a happy “trans kid” by British media.

Kelly, of central Middlesborough, was initially arrested following a raid on his home in January. The investigation was reportedly sparked by a tip sent to police indicating that Kelly was in possession of illegal material. At the time of his arrest, two phones were seized from his home, with illegal material being found on one of them. According to Teeside Live, at least one of the images depicted a 6-year-old boy being sexually abused.

Kelly later pleaded guilty to three counts of making indecent images and possessing a prohibited image of a child.

During the trial, Kelly’s defense attorney, Robert Mochrie, said that his client has had a “difficult life due to gender dysphoria,” and lamented the “social isolation she has endured during her early years.” Mochrie described his client as a “prime candidate for rehabilitation.”

The court agreed, and handed Kelly a two-year community order, along with an order to attend a mental health treatment program for six months; an alcohol abstinence program for 120 days; and attend 20 rehabilitation days. Kelly was also made the subject of a sexual harm prevention order for the next five years, which restricts his use of the internet and allows police to search his devices at any time.

Kelly’s arrest holds particular significance, as just 10 years ago he was sympathetically profiled by media for being a “trans teen.”

In a 2016 Metro article, Kelly, who was 15 years old at the time, was described as “a Kim K-lookalike.” The article notes that Kelly began formally identifying as transgender over a school break, leaving as Tyler and returning as “Kairah.”

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White House AI Framework Pushes Age Verification ID Mandate

The White House has published a National AI Legislative Framework, a set of recommendations to Congress intended to govern artificial intelligence with a single uniform standard rather than, as the document puts it, “a patchwork of conflicting state laws.”

The administration wants federal law to preempt the states. That part is straightforward. What the framework actually proposes is less straightforward.

Alongside a genuine free speech provision, the document contains age verification mandates, chat surveillance requirements, national security carve-outs that would tighten the relationship between AI companies and federal intelligence agencies, and an expansion of the TAKE IT DOWN Act, a law that we have already flagged for lacking adequate safeguards against censorship.

The White House is presenting all of this as part of the same coherent package.

Start with the child protection section: Congress should establish “commercially reasonable, privacy protective, age-assurance requirements (such as parental attestation) for AI platforms and services likely to be accessed by minors.” Age verification on AI platforms. The framework calls these requirements “privacy protective.”  They are not.

There is no version of meaningful age verification that doesn’t require collecting sensitive personal data, and there is no version of collecting sensitive personal data at scale that isn’t a breach waiting to happen.

The only tools platforms have are identity-based checks, government IDs, biometric scans, credit card data, and third-party verification services, or biometric estimation.

The only way to prove that someone is old enough to use a site is to collect personal data about who they are.

In October 2025, Discord identified 70,000 users globally who potentially had their photo IDs exposed to hackers.

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