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.

FBI failed to probe key thumb drives in Clinton email probe: DOJ watchdog files

The FBI barely glanced at potentially crucial evidence in its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state, according to a portion of a watchdog report made public Monday.

A confidential source gave thumb drives to the FBI that contained State Department data acquired via cyber intrusions — including emails from President Barack Obama and others, according to a declassified appendix to a June 2018 Justice Department inspector general report.

But the feds declined to “comprehensively” analyze those drives due to concerns about individual data caught up in the hack — despite an internal draft memo concluding it was necessary to “assess the national security risks” pertaining to Clinton’s private server use.

“This document shows an extreme lack of effort and due diligence in the FBI’s investigation of former Secretary Clinton’s email usage and mishandling of highly classified information,” said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) of the appendix.

The report was penned by then-DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who currently holds the same position at the Federal Reserve Board and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

It is unclear whether the FBI has since carried out a more thorough probe of the hard drives since the 2018 watchdog report was released.

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Debunking the 100,000 Medicaid Deaths Myth

“More Americans will die—at least 100,000 more over the course of the next decade,” wrote Yale law professor Natasha Sarin in a June 9 Washington Post column about the Medicaid cuts in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

“That isn’t hyperbolic,” Sarin added. “It is fact.”

The average reader might be inclined to believe Sarin, who holds a Harvard Ph.D. in economics as well as a Harvard law degree, and served in the Treasury Department during the Biden administration. But contrary to her characterization, her claim is both hyperbole and not “fact.”

Sarin’s assertion reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of “statistical lives saved.” In particular, she and several other prominent journalists misinterpreted a recent working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

As a professional debunker of bad research, I can say with some authority that the authors of that study, Dartmouth economist Angela Wyse and University of Chicago economist Bruce D. Meyer, wrote an excellent paper—a rarity among academic studies these days. But the University of Chicago’s press office trumpeted the paper’s findings, declaring, “Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act saved about 27,400 lives between 2010-22,” which is highly misleading. 

That take was echoed in coverage of the study by major news outlets. “The expansion of Medicaid has saved more than 27,000 lives since 2010, according to the most definitive study yet on the program’s health effects,” reported Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz in The New York Times. Their May 16 article was headlined “As Congress Debates Cutting Medicaid, a Major Study Shows It Saves Lives.” 

The story was also picked up by Time (“Medicaid Expansions Saved Tens of Thousands of Lives, Study Finds”), NPR (“New Studies Show What’s at Stake if Medicaid Is Scaled Back”), NBC News (“Proposed Medicaid Cuts Could Lead to Thousands of Deaths, Study Finds”), and several other news outlets. These journalists either didn’t read the study, didn’t understand it, or willfully misrepresented its findings for partisan reasons. 

In the past, conservative opponents of Medicaid have been equally guilty of misconstruing academic research to support their policy views. That is what happened with the most famous study on the subject, The Oregon Experiment—Effects of Medicaid on Clinical Outcomes, which The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published in 2013. The NBER and NEJM papers offer a similar account of Medicaid’s impact on health, but both have been misinterpreted.

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Thomas Massie’s New Bill Would Let People Sue Pharma for COVID Vaccine Injuries

Several years after the COVID-19 vaccine’s rollout, the only federal program that provides compensation for COVID vaccine injuries continues to process claims at a snail’s pace while rejecting most of those claims that it does decide.

As of June 1, only 39 people have received compensation from the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) for a COVID-19 vaccine injury. It has rejected another 4,338 claims. Some 9,423 people are still waiting for the federal government to even review their case.

The long wait times and high rejection rates have prompted some lawmakers to propose repealing the liability protections created by the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act, which prevents people from suing COVID vaccine makers in state courts and leaves them dependent on the CICP as the only possible source of compensation.

That includes Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), who introduced a bill last week to repeal the liability shields in the PREP Act.

“The PREP Act is medical malpractice martial law,” said Massie in a press release. “Americans deserve the right to seek justice when injured by government-mandated products.”

Passed as part of a defense spending bill in 2005, the PREP Act was intended to shore up companies’ willingness to produce novel “countermeasures” in the wake of a public health emergency like a pandemic or bioterror attack by shielding them from civil suits.

The law allows the Health and Human Services Secretary (HHS) to issue blanket liability waivers to countermeasures produced in response to a public health emergency. People injured from a covered countermeasure can pursue compensation through the CICP, but they can’t sue in state court.

In February 2020, then-HHS Secretary Alex Azar invoked the PREP Act’s liability shield for COVID-19 countermeasures, which covered then-yet-to-be-invented vaccines, masks, tests, and more.

Massie’s PREP Repeal Act would end those liability protections, thus opening up vaccine makers to personal injury lawsuits in state courts.

Advocates for the vaccine injured say any attention to their plight is welcome.

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Pew Poll: Few Americans Support Feds’ Blanket Prohibition of Marijuana

Eight-seven percent of Americans say that marijuana ought to be legal for either medical or adult use, according to nationwide polling compiled by the Pew Research Center.

The results are consistent with those of prior Pew polls finding that only about ten percent of US adults support a blanket policy of cannabis criminalization.

“The federal government’s ‘Flat Earth’ position on marijuana policy is remarkably out of step with both scientific and public consensus,” NORML’s Deputy Director Paul Armentano said. “Federally elected officials who refuse to take action to end cannabis criminalization do so at their own political peril.”

Fifty-four percent of respondents said that cannabis should be legal for both medical and adult use, while 33 percent of those surveyed supported medical marijuana legalization only. Consistent with prior polls, support for legalizing cannabis is strongest among liberal-leaning and younger voters (those ages 18 to 29), and it is weakest among more politically conservative-leaning voters and those over the age of 75.

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Why Do Republican Lawmakers Keep Trying To Overturn Marijuana Laws Approved By Voters?

Elections have consequences. Or so we’re told. But when it comes to respecting the outcomes of marijuana-related votes, Republican lawmakers are increasingly saying, “Not so fast.”

A case in point: Following Nebraskans’ decision to legalize medical cannabis access this past fall, Republican state Attorney General Mike Hilgers urged lawmakers to ignore the voter-approved law. Months later, a regulatory commission appointed by Republican Gov. Jim Pillen enacted “emergency rules” largely gutting the nascent program, despite over two-thirds of Nebraskans having voted for it.

Nebraska’s situation is hardly unique. In Texas, Republican AG Ken Paxton single-handedly pushed litigation striking down voter-approved marijuana depenalization ordinances in Austin, Dallas, San Marcos and other cities. All of the ordinances, which sought to limit local police from making low-level marijuana possession arrests, had been overwhelmingly approved by municipal voters.

In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation this spring that makes it harder for advocates to place policy questions on the ballot. He did so after last year’s marijuana legalization initiative gained 56 percent of the vote, just shy of the state’s mandatory 60 percent threshold.

Lawmakers in the Republican-dominated legislature further turned their backs on voters by rejecting numerous pieces of cannabis reform legislation this spring. In fact, the only marijuana-related bill approved by Florida lawmakers this year was legislation denying medical cannabis access to those with certain marijuana or other drug-related convictions on their record.

In Ohio, GOP leaders have spent the better part of the past two years seeking to repeal elements of the state’s 2023 voter-approved adult-use legalization law. These efforts include bills to recriminalize marijuana possession, rescind adults’ home cultivation rights and arbitrarily cap the total number of cannabis retail outlets permitted statewide. Thus far, none of this legislation has been successful, but at least two separate roll-back bills remain pending and are anticipated to be revisited by lawmakers this fall. (Separately, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine sought to double the special sales tax on cannabis products. While that effort also failed, lawmakers did approve a budget bill restructuring the way cannabis-related taxes are spent.)

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Anti-Marijuana Physician Who Criticized Rescheduling Proposal Joins Trump White House’s Drug Office

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) is adding to its team a medical professional who has linked marijuana use to suicide, advocated against a Florida legalization measure and criticized health agencies’ move to reschedule cannabis.

She has also said it is an “insult” to refer to cannabis as “medical.”

Roneet Lev—an emergency medicine and addition physician who previously served as chief medical officer at ONDCP under the first Trump administration—announced on Monday that she’ll be rejoining the office for the chance to “save lives on a much bigger scale.”

While she didn’t mention marijuana in the announcement on her podcast “High Truths on Drugs and Addiction,” Lev has previously spoken extensively about her issues with cannabis—describing it as an understated public health risk and arguing that commercial interests are the driving force behind the legalization movement.

In one episode of her podcast from June 2024, she dedicated over an hour to a discussion with prohibitionist advocates about the marijuana rescheduling process that was initiated under the Biden administration, making clear she strongly disagrees with the top federal health agency’s recommendation to move cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

She said that people who are accepting the scientific findings that led to the recommendation,”including some in the medical community,” are “drinking that same Kool Aid again” with marijuana as they did with prescription opioids. And she claimed that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) produced a flawed report on cannabis, with mistakes in “like every single sentence.”

“When it comes to marijuana, the harms are right in front of our eyes—but we ignore the data and follow the industry talking points just like we did in the oxycontin days,” Lev said during the segment, which featured prominent prohibitionists such as Bertha Madras, who also previously served as an ONDCP official.

The revised review process that HHS relied on to reach its Schedule III determination for marijuana posts a “threat to the entire way of approving medications and to the medical community at large,” Lev said, adding that her primary contention is the idea that cannabis possesses medical value.

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Pete Buttigieg Spent $80 Billion on DEI, Zero Progress on Air Traffic Control Systems

Department of Transportation records and airline industry sources show that under former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the agency funneled more than $80 billion into diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives while delaying critical air traffic control system modernization, as reported by The New York Post.

Federal data reviewed from 2021 to 2024 indicates that nearly 400 DEI-related grants were awarded by the Department of Transportation during Buttigieg’s tenure, a substantial increase from the 60 similar grants awarded under the previous administration.

The funding, drawn heavily from the Biden administration’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure law, accounted for over half of the DOT’s annual budget across several fiscal years.

Airline officials told The Post that Buttigieg demonstrated “little to no interest” in advancing air traffic control modernization efforts.

One executive recounted a meeting in which Buttigieg reportedly remarked that system upgrades would just help airlines “fly more planes,” questioning how that served his interests.

The failure to prioritize modernization left the FAA reliant on systems dating back to the Carter administration, contributing to staffing shortages and travel disruptions. “He was definitely pushing an agenda,” an industry official stated.

In April 2024, a coalition of aviation trade associations sent an urgent letter to DOT leadership, warning that at the FAA’s current hiring pace, it could take nearly 90 years to fully staff critical air traffic control centers in the New York region.

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Alleged MN Assassin’s Jaw-Dropping Confession Letter Implicating Tim Walz Is Released

The shooter of two Minnesota politicians and their spouses was indicted Tuesday on federal murder charges, but not before offering a jaw-dropping revelation about his relationship with Gov. Tim Walz.

Legal observers have speculated about Vance Boelter’s connection to Walz, who appointed the disturbed man to a state board. Boelter killed one lawmaker and her husband while critically wounding another and his wife during back-to-back shootings last month.

The 57-year-old, who faces the death penalty, told authorities he was “hired by U.S. Military people off the books starting in college” and had been approached by state politicians to carry out assassination attempts, including against U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).

During a search of Boelter’s vehicles — lookalike police cruisers matching his disguise as an officer — investigators found a hit list of politicians that included Klobuchar, along with a rambling manifesto claiming he intended “to spill all the beans” about who hired him.

The letter was addressed to FBI Director Kash Patel and written before he shot and killed Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman. Boelter then traveled to the home of state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette Hoffman; both were shot at close range but managed to survive.

Boelter was arrested after a two-day manhunt. His letter was made public as part of the investigation, the Western Journal reports.

“I am the shooter at large in Minnesota involved in the state 2 shootings the morning of Saturday June 15th at approximately 2:30 am and 3:30 am, or around that time,” the letter began. “I will probably be dead by the time you read this letter. I wanted to share some info with you that you might find interesting.

“I was hired by U.S. Military people off the books starting in college. I have been on projects since that time in Eastern Europe, North America, the Middle East and Africa. All in the line of doing what I thought was right and in the best interest of the United States.”

“Recently I was approached about a project that Tim Walz wanted done, and __ ___ and ___ ___ was also aware of the project,” Boelter’s alleged letter continued with redactions. “Tim wanted me to kill Amy Klobuchar and Tina [ Smith],” the state’s two Democratic U.S. senators.

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Florida Surgeon General Highlights Vaccine Injuries, Calls on NIH to Act

At a press conference at Florida State University in Tampa, Florida, Florida Surgeon General Dr Joseph Ladapo made an urgent call for the NIH program funding to help Americans injured by Covid-19 vaccines and expressed support for the May federal changes in the HHS’s restrictive Covid-19 vaccine recommendations.

On the Ground in Tampa: What Ladapo Really Said

I was invited to Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo’s press conference in Tampa on July 17, 2025. In contrast to how some mainstream outlets later portrayed it, the event centered on a call to recognize and research Covid-19 vaccine injuries, rather than a mere anti-vaccine screed. Dr. Ladapo – a physician and Florida’s top health official since 2021 – emphasized the urgent need to support those suffering adverse effects from mRNA Covid-19 shots. He praised recent federal moves to scale back mRNA vaccine recommendations for certain groups, but went further by asserting that these products “should not be used in any human beings,” given their safety profile. From my front-row perspective, Dr. Ladapo’s tone was measured yet resolute. He recounted how unusual it is, in his experience, to encounter so many post-vaccination issues. “When was the last time that you had a vaccine that literally almost every single person knows someone who had a bad reaction from it?” Ladapo asked pointedly.

Before the Covid era, he noted, he never personally knew a patient who was clearly vaccine-injured. “Now,” he continued, “there are very few people that I run into who either themselves have not had a bad reaction from these mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, or who don’t know someone who’s had a bad reaction.” 

This was a striking report that hung in the air – one supported anecdotally by nods from some attendees sharing their own stories. Dr. Ladapo stressed that adverse reactions have become distressingly commonplace, and he even bluntly called the Covid shots “terrible vaccines” as a result.

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Mexico Mandates Biometric Digital ID by 2026

Mexico has formally mandated the use of a new biometric-based digital ID system, making compulsory a previously voluntary identification mechanism known as the Unique Population Registry Code, or CURP.

Under the new law, CURP IDs will now incorporate detailed personal biometric records, including fingerprints, iris scans, and photographs embedded within a QR code.

The government plans a phased rollout, expecting full nationwide adoption by February 2026.

Historically, CURP codes facilitated everyday interactions such as filing taxes, registering companies, school enrollments, and applying for passports.

Accompanying this shift is a broader initiative to consolidate multiple government databases into a single Unified Identity Platform. Within 90 days, the Ministry of the Interior and the Digital Transformation Agency must launch the unified platform, which will be integrated into various public and private institutions’ databases.

Additionally, a separate program aimed at systematically collecting biometric data from minors is slated to commence within 120 days.

Despite the obvious privacy concerns, Mexican authorities argue that existing privacy legislation already sufficiently guards against unauthorized surveillance or misuse of sensitive data.

President Claudia Sheinbaum responded to privacy concerns earlier this month, clarifying, “A wiretap can only be approved by a judge, according to the Constitution and the law,” though that doesn’t placate concerns about data breaches and the wider introduction of a checkpoint society.

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