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.

When one man, a civilian, controls the kill switch for military ops

In September 2022, Ukrainian forces prepared to launch a drone strike on the Russian naval fleet anchored off Crimea. The drones never arrived.

Elon Musk had decided, unilaterally, not to activate Starlink coverage over the region. But he wasn’t simply declining to help. SpaceX had already been managing battlefield access for both sides: restricting Russian use, imposing speed limits to prevent drone integration, and maintaining a verified whitelist with Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense. One private citizen, with no security clearance and no accountability to any electorate, was governing the battlefield connectivity of an active war.

The public debate treats this as a story about Elon Musk — his politics, his proximity to the White House, his X posts. That framing lets the actual problem off the hook. Replace Musk with the most patriotic, internationalist, apolitical CEO imaginable and the structural problem remains identical. The Pentagon has spent a decade building critical military functions on infrastructure it can’t legally compel, and the consequences are now arriving in real time.

A common reflex is to argue that private defense contractors have always been central to American military power. Lockheed Martin builds the F-35; Raytheon builds the Patriot. What’s different now is the control plane: who has real-time administrative control during use. When the government buys a tank, it owns it. The keys don’t expire. The manufacturer can’t disable it mid-mission or impose terms in combat. Software and AI are different. Vendors keep ongoing control — updates, access, and usage limits. They don’t sell a capability; they license access to one, and the license has conditions.

Those conditions have already collided with active operations. After months of failed negotiations, the Pentagon formally designated the AI firm Anthropic a supply-chain risk because of restrictions on how its model could be used. The Pentagon was explicit in its decision: “The military will not allow a vendor to insert itself into the chain of command.” Emil Michael, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, described the moment he fully grasped the vulnerability: Anthropic’s models were already embedded across combatant commands and intelligence agencies, wired into classified workflows. Anthropic retained the control plane inside the Pentagon’s cloud — able to update, restrict, or shut off access. When Michael raised hypothetical crisis scenarios, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, offered exceptions case by case. “Just call me if you need another exception,” Michael recalls him saying. In a genuine crisis, a commander can’t call a vendor to authorize military action, nor should he have to.

This isn’t about whether Anthropic’s rules are reasonable. They weren’t set by anyone accountable to the joint force, there’s no override mechanism, and the Pentagon had made itself dependent on systems it doesn’t control.

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Bahrain Intensifies Crackdown On Shia Communities, Arrests Dozens Over Alleged IRGC Links

Bahrain’s Interior Ministry announced on Saturday the arrest of 41 citizens, including multiple Shia religious leaders, over alleged ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The ministry said security services uncovered the alleged network through “investigations, security reports, and previous Public Prosecution cases related to espionage involving foreign entities.” The detainees are accused of “espionage involving foreign entities and sympathy with blatant Iranian aggression.”

Around 30 Shia Muslim clerics were among the 41 arrested, as the Gulf monarchy intensifies a campaign of raids and arrests predominantly targeting Shia religious figures and seminary teachers in Bahrain.

The arrests mark a new security escalation by Manama and form part of a continued policy of restrictions against clerics in the country. The Bahrain News Agency reported that legal proceedings are now underway against the 41 detainees.

Earlier this week, Bahrain stripped three lawmakers of their seats in parliament after they publicly criticized the monarchy’s crackdown on dissent over its support for the US–Israeli war on Iran:

In a vote in Manama on Thursday, the Bahraini House of Representatives revoked the memberships of Abdulnabi Salman, Mahdi al-Shuwaikh, and Mamdouh al-Saleh. The three lawmakers publicly opposed the monarchy’s move last week to revoke the citizenship of 69 Bahrainis and their families, accusing them of “sympathizing with Iran.”

Bahrain has a majority Shia population but is ruled by the Sunni Al-Khalifa royal family. The kingdom hosts the largest US naval base in the region, home to the US Fifth Fleet.

That decision came less than two weeks after Bahrain revoked the citizenship of 69 people over alleged support for Iranian retaliatory attacks on the country.

The Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy described the move as “dangerous” and a “blatant abuse of power,” saying the individuals had not been publicly named and that their legal status remained unclear.

Since the launch of the US-Israeli war on Iran on February 28, Bahrain has escalated a sweeping domestic crackdown tied to alleged support for Tehran and opposition to the country’s western alignments.

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Biden to Fight Trump DOJ Over Release of 70 Hours of Audiotapes of His Conversations with Ghostwriter

Joe Biden will fight the Trump DOJ to prevent the release 70 hours of audiotapes of the former president’s conversations with his ghostwriter.

Last week it was reported that the DOJ was preparing to release damning audio of Biden’s interview with former Special Counsel Robert Hur. The Department is also going to release 2017 audio recordings of conversations with his ghostwriter in which he disclosed classified information.

Joe Biden is expected to intervene, according to Politico. The Judge says Biden has until Tuesday to respond.

“Former President Joe Biden intends to intervene in litigation to block the Trump administration’s effort to release 70 hours of partially redacted audio recordings of interviews he conducted in 2017 with a ghostwriter who worked with Biden on his memoirs, the Justice Department indicated in new court papers,” Politico reported.

“DOJ lawyers told a federal judge in Washington on Friday that they expected Biden would seek to “prevent any such disclosures” of the audio tapes to Congress and to the conservative Heritage Foundation, which sued last year to access the materials,” the outlet reported.

“President Biden cooperated fully with Special Counsel Hur, and agreed to provide audiotapes of conversations with his biographer for a book about his deceased son on the condition that they would not be made public,” Biden spokesperson TJ Ducklo said in a statement to Politico. “The DOJ themselves have said these tapes serve no public interest.”

“What’s happening now isn’t about transparency. It’s about politics,” Ducklo continued. “If this Administration were genuinely committed to transparency, they would release Volume 2 of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on Donald Trump’s own alleged mishandling of classified documents. That report contains information Americans actually deserve to see.”

Joe Biden previously asserted executive privilege over the audio recordings related to then-Special Counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into his stolen classified documents scandal.

Republicans have argued that Joe Biden cannot assert executive privilege over the audio since the transcript has already been released.

Then-US Attorney General Merrick Garland classified the audio tapes of Biden’s interview with Hur as “Top Secret” and locked it way in a SCIF.

The Oversight Project vowed to obtain and release Biden’s audio recordings of his conversation with his ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer.

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Paris Prosecutors Move to Criminally Charge Musk and xAI

Paris prosecutors announced Thursday that their investigation into Elon Musk’s social platform X has been upgraded to a full criminal probe.

The Paris prosecutor’s office is now asking investigating magistrates to formally charge Musk, former X CEO Linda Yaccarino, and three companies linked to the platform, including xAI and X.AI Holdings Corp. If they refuse to appear for those charges, prosecutors say judges can issue warrants that carry the same legal weight.

The charges cover a long and growing list of alleged offenses: Complicity in possessing and distributing sexual images. Nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfakes. Denial of crimes against humanity. Fraudulent extraction of user data. Violation of the secrecy of electronic correspondence. Manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group. Illegal collection of personal data without adequate security.

The announcement came just three weeks after the US Department of Justice refused to cooperate with the French investigation, calling it an attempt to regulate American speech through foreign criminal law. France pushed ahead anyway.

The investigation did not begin with deepfakes or child safety. It began with politics.

French Member of Parliament Éric Bothorel, a member of President Macron’s centrist Renaissance party, filed a complaint in 2025 alleging that X’s algorithm had been manipulated for the purpose of “foreign interference” in French politics.

Bothorel accused the platform of narrowing “diversity of voices and options” after Musk’s takeover and cited Musk’s “personal interventions” in moderation decisions.

A second complaint, from a senior official in French public administration, alleged the same thing, claiming to observe a surge of “hateful, racist, anti-LGBTQ” content aimed at skewing democratic debate.

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FBI Launches Criminal Investigation into Senate Intel Committee Democrats for Leaking CLASSIFIED Intel on DNI Tulsi Gabbard to the New York Times: Report

The FBI has reportedly launched a criminal investigation into whether Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee or their staff leaked classified intelligence information to The New York Times in an apparent effort to damage Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard during her confirmation battle.

According to reporting from Just the News, the probe centers on a National Security Agency criminal referral last year tied to the disclosure of a classified overseas intercept that surfaced in a New York Times report during Gabbard’s contentious nomination process.

Sources told the outlet that FBI Director Kash Patel moved quickly after learning of the dormant referral, opening a criminal investigation into whether Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats or their staff improperly disclosed classified material.

The alleged leak reportedly involved intelligence tied to Gabbard’s 2017 Syria trip.

The intercepts reportedly captured two Hezbollah terrorists discussing Gabbard’s 2017 trip to Syria, where they claimed she met with “the big guy.”

The classified material was in the hands of Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats and their staff before it magically appeared in the New York Times hit piece.

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Minnesota nonprofit accused of siphoning $6.5M to fund Vegas trips, luxury cars, private liquor store

The head of a Minnesota nonprofit allegedly siphoned off more than $6 million in taxpayer funds to treat himself to such lavish goodies as trips to Vegas, luxury rides and shopping sprees at Harley Davidson.

Trahern Pollard, founder and now-former director of the nonprofit We Push For Peace, was supposed to be leading his organization in providing “conflict de-escalation’’ work after George Floyd’s murder — an effort fueled by millions of dollars in government contracts, according to Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison in a new lawsuit against the group.

Instead, Pollard diverted more than $6 million of the dough to fund a well-heeled lifestyle for himself — not to mention to pay off child support, settle a tax bill with the IRS and subsidize his private businesses, including a liquor store and a used-car dealership, authorities said.

Pollard’s fellow former director, Jaclyn McGuigan, also was nailed in the alleged scheme.

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Legal group exposes heavy use of Minnesota’s ‘vouching’ system to override voting ID rules

America First Legal, a conservative legal group, has obtained records from the Minnesota Secretary of State showing thousands of Minnesotans used the state’s “vouching” system to bypass voter ID while registering or updating their information during recent election cycles.

The records, which were obtained through a public records request, showed that Minnesota’s Election Day Registration process allows registered voters or certain residential facility employees to verify another voter’s residency in place of standard identification or proof-of-address documents.

Minnesota law reportedly allows a registered voter from the same precinct or an authorized employee of a residential facility to confirm another individual’s residency for voting purposes if that person lacks traditional documentation in-person at the polls.

According to the data released by AFL, almost 18,900 Election Day registrations in 2024 involved the use of vouching. 

Of those, 13,441 were updates to existing voter registrations, while 5,457 involved new voter registrations.

The records also showed 10,278 voter registrations or updates using vouching during the 2022 election cycle, including 2,215 new registrations. 

In 2020, the state recorded 17,616 vouched-for Election Day registrations or updates, including 5,069 new registrations, the data showed.

AFL said it tried to get more information from the secretary of state’s office, including data showing whether voters were vouched for by private citizens or residential facility employees, lists of authorized facility staff, and records involving alleged fraudulent or suspicious activity connected to the system.

According to AFL, the secretary of state’s office responded that it “does not record or maintain data on vouching method,” and in several categories replied that there was “no data responsive” to the request.

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Radical Woke Bexar County Judge – The County’s First Openly LGBT Activist on the Bench – Resigns in Disgrace and Accepts LIFETIME BAN from Judiciary

Bexar County Court-at-Law No. 13 Judge Rosie Speedlin-Gonzalez, the self-proclaimed “first openly LGBT judge” in the county, has been forced to resign in disgrace and accept a permanent, lifetime disqualification from ever holding judicial office in the State of Texas again.

According to the Texas State Commission on Judicial Conduct, Speedlin-Gonzalez signed off on the deal on April 20, 2026, quietly slinking off the bench effective immediately.

In exchange, prosecutors dropped felony unlawful restraint and misdemeanor official oppression charges against her.

The scandal stems from a December 2024 courtroom meltdown during a domestic violence probation revocation hearing. Defense attorney Elizabeth Russell dared to try changing her client’s plea mid-hearing.

Speedlin-Gonzalez flew into a rage, accused the attorney of “coaching” her client, and ordered bailiffs to slap handcuffs on Russell right there in open court.

The attorney was then marched into the jury box and detained like a common criminal, all because she had the audacity to advocate for her client in front of this power-drunk judge.

The downfall was politically humiliating as well. Speedlin-Gonzalez had already lost her Democrat primary reelection bid earlier this year.

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Kim Jong Un Creates Ultimate Deadman Switch: North Korea To Auto-Launch Nukes If Assassinated

North Korea just casually revised its constitution to automatically launch a nuclear strike if leader Kim Jong Un is assassinated, or if the country’s nuclear command-and-control system is placed in danger by hostile forces’ attacks. 

The change was adopted during the first session of the 15th Supreme People’s Assembly in Pyongyang on March 22 and was disclosed this week by South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, which briefed senior officials on the details.

The updated Article 3 of North Korea’s nuclear policy law states: “If the command-and-control system over the state’s nuclear forces is placed in danger by hostile forces’ attacks … a nuclear strike shall be launched automatically and immediately.”

South Korean intelligence officials said the revision codifies procedures for retaliatory nuclear attacks in the event that Kim is killed or incapacitated during an attack, Reuters reports.

The policy update comes months after the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior Iranian officials in U.S.-backed Israeli strikes in February 2026. Analysts have described those operations as a “wake-up call” for Pyongyang, highlighting the effectiveness of leadership-targeted strikes.

Professor Andrei Lankov of Kookmin University in Seoul told The Telegraph that the constitutional emphasis gives added weight to what may have been existing policy: “This may have been policy before, but it has added emphasis now it has been enshrined in the constitution. Iran was the wake-up call.”

The nuclear policy revision was adopted alongside broader changes to North Korea’s constitution, also passed in March and revealed earlier this week. Those amendments remove all references to unification with South Korea, add an explicit territorial clause defining the country’s borders (including with the Republic of Korea to the south), and formally state that command authority over nuclear forces rests with Kim Jong Un as chairman of the State Affairs Commission.

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Husbands With Two or More Wives Get Increased Benefits

The Department for Work and Pensions has increased the benefits paid out to households in polygamous marriages from April. The Express has the story.

The DWP has confirmed in its benefits uprating list that “additional spouses” in “polygamous marriages” are being given a 4.8% boost to their benefits from April, which would most likely be for husbands with multiple wives.

Those who are classed as an “additional spouse” in a polygamous marriage and are above state pension age were in 2025–26 able to claim an additional £119.50 per week of Pension Credit or Housing Benefit, with no given limit on the number of separate additional spouses who can claim in one household, other than the overall benefits cap per household per year.

From April 2026, this has been increased to £125.25 per week per additional spouse, a 4.8% increase in line with wage growth, which is how Pension Credit is automatically increased each spring, which is another £5.75 per week, or £299 extra per year.

The money is less than that person would be able to claim if they lived alone (£238 from April 2026), but is still extra money for a three-person household’s income compared to a two-person marriage.

The rule is not new, but the amount given to second wives is still being increased each year.

Although bigamy is illegal in the UK, the act of marrying more than one person at a time – polygamy – is not illegal if the marriages took place overseas.

This is legal where a person has married multiple wives (or husbands) overseas while legally living in a country where this is legally allowed, and then moved to the UK legally afterwards.

In that circumstance, a person now legally living in the UK, who legally married more than one spouse while living overseas, can then see their second, third and even fourth wife (or husband) all claim an additional £125.25 each per week, as long as that additional spouse came to the UK legally in their own right.

The DWP’s benefits and pension rates 2026 to 2027 document states: “If the claimant is a member of a polygamous marriage and all of the members of the marriage have attained pensionable age on or after April 1st 2021, for the claimant and the other party to the marriage [the allowance per week is now] £363.25.

“For each additional spouse who is a member of the same household as the claimant [the allowance per week is now] £125.25.”

It is understood the DWP believe the number of claimants to be small although it has not been able to provide a number for how many second or third wives do claim the benefit.

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