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.

More Military Assassinations in the Caribbean

The US military announced this week that it had killed four “narco-terrorists” by blowing up another boat in the Caribbean. This now brings the military death toll from these types of military boat killings to 235 people.

I have addressed these types of killings in the past, but as long as the US national-security establishment continues to engage in them, it is important to continue highlighting the evil nature of these killings.

There are several points that I wish to emphasize about these boat killings:

1. Simply because it is the military doing the killing does not mean that wartime rules apply. That’s because the military is operating in a police capacity by enforcing the US “war on drugs.” The drug “war” is not real war — that’s just a figure of speech. Ordinarily, it is the DEA or the local police who are enforcing America’s decades-old drug war. Here, the military is stepping into the shoes of the DEA by helping to enforce the federal government’s drug laws. That means that the same principles of criminal justice apply to the military as they do to the DEA. The fact that US officials claim to be “at war” against drug dealers is obviously just a ruse to enable them to ignore the Constitution.

2. The Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution expressly prohibits federal officials from depriving people of life without due process of law, which necessarily means charging people with crimes and according them a trial. That’s obviously not what the military is doing with its killings of those people in boats on the high seas. No criminal indictment. No trial. No opportunity to contest the government’s evidence or accusation. Simply summary executions  based on the government’s unilateral determination that the occupants are drug traffickers.

3. Given the lack of due process of law, the military killings of these boat people operate as state-inflicted assassinations. One big advantage of using the military, rather than the DEA, to commit these assassinations is that military operations traditionally receive extraordinary judicial deference, especially when the executive branch invokes national security and armed conflict.

4. It is the height of hypocrisy to have the military enforcing criminal laws outside the United States, given that US law prohibits the military from enforcing criminal laws inside the United States. If it’s a bad idea for the military to be involved in law enforcement against Americans, then it’s a bad idea for the military to be involved in law enforcement against foreign citizens.

5. The killings amount to military cowardice, akin to a federal official shooting a criminal suspect in the back. Given the overwhelming power of the military, it could easily approach people in boats and demand that they surrender. Instead, the military chooses to kill them, knowing that for all practical purposes. the victims pose no danger whatsoever to the powerful military armada charged with killing them. After all, given that the Coast Guard’s policy is based on stopping boats, searching them, taking suspects into custody, and returning suspects to the U.S for trial, there is no good reason why the military can’t follow that same policy.

6. The omnipotent, non-reviewable military power to assassinate people in the enforcement of the federal government’s drug war arguably applies to everyone, including Americans. The fact that the US government is exercising its assassination power against drug-war suspects here in the United States as of now doesn’t mean that it can’t exercise such power in the future.

7. The fact that the military claims to have “intelligence” pointing toward criminal culpability of the victims is irrelevant from both a legal and a moral standpoint. Under America’s original criminal-justice principles, any such “intelligence” must be tested in a court of law, especially since it oftentimes proves to be faulty. Moreover, as most people know by now, federal officials have been known to make up or concoct evidence as a way to frame people who they are convinced are criminals. That’s one of the reasons we have trials in America’s criminal-justice system rather than have the DEA or the cops simply shoot and kill drug-war suspects.

8. These military drug-war killings are what we would expect from authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, such as North Korea, Vietnam, or Saudi Arabia, not with a nation that professes adherence to due process of law.

9. The military’s boat killings reflect a deep denigration of the value of human life, especially for foreign citizens.

10. The drug-war killings constitute a grave violation of God’s sacred commandment against murder.

11. The military’s boat killings are no different in principle from what former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte is being criminally prosecuted for by the International Criminal Court. He stands accused of ordering his officials to summarily kill drug war suspects without according them due process of law.

12. Regardless of how many people the US military kills in the enforcement of the federal government’s drug laws, the drug war will never be “won.” It will go on forever, with the national-security establishment and the rest of the federal government gaining ever-more destructive power over both Americans and foreigners — brutal police-state power that will continue to destroy people’s liberty and privacy.

13. No government, including the US government, wields the legitimate moral authority to punish anyone for possessing, ingesting, or distributing any drug whatsoever. In a genuinely free society, people have the right to possess, ingest, or distribute any drug they want.

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Border Patrol Unleashes Violence on Protesters Over Trump’s Border Wall

Since construction began on President Donald Trump’s border wall in haste on October 5, federal agents have clashed with land defenders and arrested roughly two dozen activists who camped out on private land to protest the destruction of fragile desert ecosystems on both sides of the imaginary line that separates Mexico from the tiny town of Lochiel, Arizona.

The protest received media attention after Border Patrol agents extracted and arrested a tree sitter and cut down the “Grandmother Tree,” an ancient cottonwood in a grove of several trees that stood in the way of contractors building the border wall. Estimated to be around 200 years old — older than the current border — the grove’s branches reached from the United States to Mexico, a symbol of international solidarity for the protesters.

The felling of the Grandmother Tree may have also symbolized the Trump administration’s disregard for nature and public opinion, but it did not mark the end of the protests, as construction continues. Video captured by journalist Max Granger shows land defenders climbing into a tree on the Mexican side Tuesday morning and setting up another tree-sit style blockade in a renewed attempt to halt construction. Clashes with Border Patrol continued throughout that day, with activists accusing federal agents of dragging protesters across a barbed wire fence during a chaotic confrontation that was caught on video.

On Wednesday afternoon, a protester locked themselves to moving construction machinery, according to a statement from activists. Border Patrol agents attempted to remove the protester with “extreme pain compliance” and pepper sprayed the surrounding crowd, the activists said. Protester continued to lock themselves down after construction came to a halt and construction crews left, the activists noted. “We do not intend to back down,” said Adriana, a Tierra Libre activist identified only by first name, in a statement on Wednesday. “Our resolve only grows with their violence.”

Jason, an activist from the Tierra Libre protest camp in Lochiel who declined to use his last name due to concerns over state repression, said roughly two dozen people have been arrested. Some received citations on the spot, and others were taken into custody and released onto the streets of Nogales or Tucson hours later, he noted.

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Axios Looks for Silver Lining in Trump’s Tinfoil Economy

Axios (10/5/26) thinks it’s spotted a mystery: “President Trump’s economic data keeps getting stronger. His economic polling keeps getting worse by the day.”

Or as the political news site put it in an earlier story (9/30/26): “America’s economy is roaring ahead. And Americans feel lousy about it.”

As both stories note, people don’t feel like the economy is “roaring ahead.” So what’s the proof that they’re wrong? As is its wont, Axios provides bullet points in the October 5 piece to lay out the “ample evidence the economy is, statistically speaking, relatively strong.”

First up: “Economic growth is solid and accelerating.” The link that backs that up goes to the September 30 piece, which reported, “The economy grew at a 2.2% annualized rate in the second quarter, a sharp upgrade from the 1.5% previously reported.”

Is 2.2% growth “relatively strong,” though? Average annual GDP growth since 1947 is 3.2%, a full percentage point higher. If that seems like too long a time frame for comparison, the Biden years—a period when the economy was rarely described as “roaring ahead” or “relatively strong”—averaged 3.7% annual GDP growth. Leaving out 2021—an exceptional year when the economy bounced back strongly from the Covid recession—still leaves Biden’s economy growing at 2.8% a year.

Relatively speaking, then, Trump’s growth is rather weak. It’s not “accelerating,” either; over the six quarters so far of Trump’s second term, the average annual growth rate has been 2.2%—the same as in the most recent quarter.

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Florida Seeks Meta ID Checks For All Users

Florida’s attorney general is asking a court to make sure Meta (Facebook and Instagram) puts in place a system to check the age of all its users in that state.

If the court grants the motion, every user in Florida will have to surrender their privacy and will have to verify their age to access speech and, if they are under 14, Meta will have to remove them from the platforms. And if Meta can’t do that within 30 days, it will have to cut off every user under 18 until it implements the age-checking system.

In the meantime, the court is asked to order Meta to set limits on the use of its platforms by teenagers, including hours when they can use them, and features they can access.

“Request proof of age for Instagram and Facebook accounts belonging to users that Meta’s systems know or predict to be under the age of 14, and mark for deletion the accounts of those who do not verify their age within 30 days,” the filing says.

It also wants Meta to “Adopt and apply an age assurance framework to every Teen User.”

It asks Meta to “Treat users who Meta has reason to believe are under 14 or under 18 years of age as under those respective ages unless the users age verify.”

The motion spells it out: “If within 30 days of the entry of this injunction, Meta cannot implement the measures for user-age verification and removal in this and the prior sections, Meta must cease to allow any Young Users access to its Platforms in Florida until these measures are implemented.” Young Users means users under 18.

The default mode for teens should be “quiet mode from 9 p.m. to 8 a.m. year-round, and from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on academic-year weekdays”, the filing says. It also wants Meta to hide “like” counts from teenagers by default, disable autoplay and infinite scroll unless a parent turns them on, and limit the time spent on the platforms to “not more than 60 hours per month.”

The motion mentions internal Meta communications, including one that says “IG is a drug” and another that reads, “We’re basically pushers.”

Another employee is quoted as saying about hiding “like” counts, “It’s a social comparison app, fucking get used to it.”

The court is yet to rule on the motion, but Attorney General James Uthmeier announced the filing on X, saying, “We just asked a Florida court to order Meta to turn off the features that addict teenagers and to leave Florida kids alone when they’re in school or sleeping.”

Uthmeier also revealed that Meta tried to get Florida to accept a settlement, but was rebuffed. “Meta tried to get us to take their low-ball settlement, but we wont sell out our kids,” he wrote.

The attorney general’s motion calls the national settlement a “mere slap on the wrist” for a company that is valued at “roughly $1.86 trillion.”

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San Jose tells food pantry it must shut down

A popular San Jose neighborhood food pantry is at risk of closing again after being hit with more zoning violations.

Lighthouse Food Rescue & Distribution was cited by San Jose on Sept. 25 for hosting its food distribution on the sidewalk and for not following zoning rules, as a food distribution center is no longer permitted in that neighborhood. If the organization does not comply within 10 days by removing the distribution and canopies from the sidewalk, it will start incurring daily fines of up to $20,000 a day, according to the citation, which also says the food pantry must cease operations within 60 days.

“I’m up against the wall,” Pastor Ralph Olmos, president and CEO of the food pantry, told San José Spotlight. “It’s almost like (the city is) telling me to stop. But my conviction says, ‘How can I leave the people?’”

Residents and advocates have said the food pantry is a lifeline for the community, serving families, older adults, homeless people and those with disabilities. The organization feeds more than 1,000 people a day, five days a week from noon to 5 p.m. It offers a variety of foods that are not available at other pantries — including milk, meat and eggs.

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When Did Obesity Become a Drug Deficiency?

Look at almost any photograph of an American crowd taken 60 years ago. It can be a baseball game, a high school graduation, a beach, an airport terminal, a factory floor, or simply people walking down a city street. Something is immediately noticeable to modern eyes, although almost nobody in the photograph would have considered it remarkable: most people are relatively thin.

They did not have continuous glucose monitors, smartphone applications that counted calories and macronutrients, wearable devices reminding them to stand, boutique fitness studios, bariatric surgery centers, or medications capable of producing 15 or 20 percent reductions in body weight. They were not necessarily more virtuous than we are, and they certainly did not possess superior genes. They lived in a different metabolic environment.

The data backs up what we see in those old photos. In the early 1960s, about 13 percent of American adults were obese. By August 2023, that number had jumped to 40.3 percent, with another 31.7 percent considered overweight and nearly one in ten classified as severely obese.[1] This trend isn’t just in the United States. A huge study of over 220 million people from 200 countries found a dramatic global rise in obesity between 1990 and 2022.[2] Our genes haven’t changed much in that time. Something else has.

We’re now at a turning point in medicine. Faced with one of the biggest and fastest changes in human health, we’re treating the results as a condition that needs lifelong medication. The newest drugs are very effective, and that’s important to recognize. Semaglutide and tirzepatide have led to weight loss that older nonsurgical treatments rarely matched.[3,4] Semaglutide has also reduced the risk of major heart problems in people with overweight or obesity and heart disease who didn’t have diabetes.[5] Tirzepatide has greatly improved sleep apnea in people with obesity.[6] These results are significant, and these drugs are much more than cosmetic weight-loss aids.

That’s why we need to look closely at what’s happening now. The problem isn’t that these drugs don’t work; they clearly do. The real concern is that they might work so well that we stop asking why so many people need them in the first place. We could be seeing a major medical breakthrough, but at the same time, we might be accepting that the effects of an unhealthy environment should just be managed with medication. The real question isn’t whether these “GLP-1” drugs are effective. It’s whether their success is making us stop looking for the root causes of the obesity epidemic.

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The $17 Trillion Tax Hike That Leaves Social Security Broke

If you take a look at your last pay stub, you will find a line marked OASDI. It stands for Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance, which is the formal name for Social Security. The tax on that line is 6.2% of your wages. What you do not see on that stub is that your employer paid a matching 6.2% of your paycheck directly to the U.S. Treasury. On a $60,000 salary, those two halves equal $7,440 a year. Exactly $0.00 of it went into an account bearing your name. Every single penny went out immediately as a check to a current retiree or a disabled American.

The entire system rests on a beautifully simple, multi-generational promise: Today’s workers carry today’s retirees, and tomorrow’s workers will carry us. For decades, more money came in than went out. But instead of saving the surplus, Washington borrowed the extra cash, spent it on daily government operations, and left a stack of non-marketable IOUs in a drawer. Federal bureaucrats call that paper a “trust fund.” In reality, calling it a trust fund is like putting an IOU in your kid’s piggy bank and telling them their college tuition is fully funded.

Since 2021, the program has paid out more than it takes in. To cover the shortfall, the government has been cashing those IOUs, forcing the Treasury to borrow massive amounts from the public. By 2034, the drawer for the combined retirement and disability funds will be completely empty. By law, that means every retiree’s check will instantly face a devastating 17% automatic haircut.

Enter Brian Poindexter, the Democratic candidate for Congress in Ohio’s 7th District. He claims he can fix it. Today, the Social Security tax stops once a worker earns $184,500 in a year. His plan calls for three dramatic shifts: remove that income limit so high earners pay on every dollar, let people collect full checks at a younger age, and make the checks bigger. Removing the cap, he confidently promises, “will instantly make it solve.”

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British chemical warfare commentator’s MI6 ties exposed in leaked emails

Private messages show show Hamish De Bretton-Gordon, a top British pundit on the Salisbury poisoning incident, was a close associate of the MI6 officer who handled the Russian intelligence defector at the center of the scandal — and reaped considerable benefits from his proximity to the case.

This September, a former British Army officer named Hamish De Bretton-Gordon filed a column with the UK Telegraph complaining that “Russian bots” had “tried to make out that I’m part of a security service conspiracy.” Having shot to prominence as a media commentator on chemical and biological weapons after the alleged poisoning of turncoat Russian spy Sergei Skripal, De Bretton-Gordon dismissed accusations that he collaborated with UK intelligence as the product of the “Kremlin’s malign tactics.”

Despite his fervent denials, leaked emails reviewed by The Grayzone indicate that De Bretton-Gordon has spent years privately coordinating his public statements with senior British military and intelligence figures. The correspondences show him training operatives in Turkey and instructing Israeli military figures on Syria’s still-elusive stockpile of chemical weapons, “and a bit of Novichok,” referring to the Russian toxin supposedly used to poison Skripal.

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Watch the Hosts of ‘The View’ Openly Campaign for Texas Democrat James Talarico on the Air

This week, Ana Navarro, Whoopi Goldberg, and the rest of the crew on ‘The View’ openly campaigned for far left Texas Democrat James Talarico on the air, in what seems to be a clear violation of FCC rules.

This has been happening a lot lately. Less than two weeks ago, Ana Navarro openly campaigned for a Democrat running for a House seat in Florida.

Trump’s FCC has been looking into these claims. It couldn’t be more obvious, could it?

The hosts are openly cheerleading for the Democrats to win.

Transcript via NewsBusters:

SUNNY HOSTIN: I think we will. I think we will see Texas go blue, actually.

I really do.

In September not only one but eight pollsters had Talarico ahead. 51 to 45 percent. That’s significant given a Democrat hasn’t won statewide office in 30 years. That same poll showed that he is leading Paxton among women, 56 percent to 40 percent. Among voters, 18 to 29, 66 percent to 22 percent. And among Hispanics 62 percent to 30 percent. We are talking about Texas. He is going to win this race.

GOLDBERG: We’ll see. We’ll see.

GOLDBERG: Remember. As – I’m sorry. As you guys pointed out the other day, we’ve seen this before. We have seen – I and suddenly some weird number comes out. And you’re going, ‘wait, what happened?’ So, fingers crossed.

ANA NAVARRO: You’re not kidding. 2016 left me scarred.

GOLDBERG: I know.

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Europe Simply Needs War

Merz does not care about the fate of Germany or its people. Here we are on precisely the week of October 5th and Merz is saying that Russia staged some armed attack on Leipzig airport. He is publicly stating that Germany is effectively at war with Russia. The EU is crumbling and the AfD has beaten Merz to a pulp, so its now time to go out with a bang and declare war has already begun.

Here is Merz declaring that Brussels is indeed very concerned about the rise of of what they call far-right parties that are anti-EU with the common thread being their migrant policies. The nature of that concern has also now shifted significantly. The current anxiety in EU institutions is not just about the imminent “exit” threat, but also I hear they fear a growing strategic objective by these parties to weaken and obstruct the EU from the inside.

They don’t worry the exit scenario, since they are pros at manipulating elections as they did in Italy, UK, Hungary and Romania or use the courts to block separatists as in Barcelona. They are now also examining the draft strategy document from AfD lawmakers, which shifts away from calling for an immediate German withdrawal from the EU and eurozone. Instead, it proposes prioritizing the reform of the EU into a “union of sovereign nations,” and advocates for a membership referendum only if those reforms fail. In other words – take back power like over migration.

This shift is partly pragmatic. The AfD is currently isolated in the European Parliament, and more moderate right-wing parties, like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, have openly criticized the AfD’s “anti-European” stance. Dropping the exit demand makes the AfD a more palatable ally for these larger far-right groups.

This strategic change creates a more difficult problem for the EU than a simple exit campaign that they can fight with rigged elections. Here, a referendum requires a party to convince a majority to take a radical step. In contrast, internal disruption only requires enough power to block, dilute, and redirect policy from within the system. The EU’s existing tools, which were designed to reassure citizens about the benefits of membership, are ill-suited to counter this kind of internal gridlock. This is why they rigged both the Romanian and Hungarian elections.

Parties like the AfD and Hungary’s Fidesz can exploit unanimity rules to veto EU-wide decisions. For example, Hungary has blocked crucial sanctions and loans for Ukraine, and the far-right Patriots for Europe group has worked to dilute the Green Deal and the Migration Pact. This dysfunction then becomes campaign material for these parties, who position themselves as defenders of national interests against a “paralyzed” Brussels. This was why the Hungarian government has repeatedly accused Ukraine of interfering in its elections to remove Orban. Sources in Washington reveal that Ukraine is also interfering in US elections funding the opposition of anyone in Congress who is against sending money to Ukraine. Israel has been doing the same.

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