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.

Israel’s Death Cult Grips the US

The admission this week by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, echoed by Mike Johnson, speaker of the House of Representatives, that Israel forced Washington’s hand in attacking Iran has rightly caused consternation.

Breathing life into something that would normally be treated as an antisemitic trope, Rubio argued that the Trump administration had been left with no choice but to attack Iran because, had it not, Israel would have launched an attack anyway, exposing U.S. soldiers to retaliation.

Rubio stated: 

“The president made the very wise decision: We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

Rubio was using the term “preemptively” in a highly irregular and misleading way.

In international law, aggression is an illegal application of force — the “supreme international crime,” according to the 1950 principles set out by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. But there is a potential mitigating factor if the attacking state can show it was acting pre-emptively: that is, it was acting to prevent a plausible, immediate and severe threat of attack.

Rubio, however, was not suggesting that the U.S. acted “preemptively” against a threat from Iran. He meant Washington had acted preemptively to stop its ally, Israel, from setting off a chain of military events that would lead to U.S. soldiers being harmed.

Had the Trump administration really been acting preemptively in these circumstances, the U.S. should have attacked Israel, not Iran.

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Iran’s new supreme leader is named as Ali Khamenei’s son Mojtaba – Iranian TV network reports

Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has reportedly been appointed Iran‘s new Supreme Leader.  

Mojtaba, 56, Ali Khamenei’s second oldest son, has strong links to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and was chosen by Iran’s Assembly of Experts ‘under pressure from the Revolutionary Guards’, according to Iranian opposition outlet Iran International.

Mojtaba is not a high-ranking cleric, has never held office and does not have an official role in the regime. 

But he served in the Iranian armed forces during the Iran-Iraq war and is believed to wield considerable influence behind the scenes. He has been touted as a possible successor to his father for years.

However, he was not included in a list of three senior clerics Ali Khamenei reportedly identified last year. 

And his father is said to have indicated opposition to his candidacy because it would resemble the hereditary rule enacted by the US-backed Shah monarchy before it was overthrown in the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Father-to-son succession is also viewed negatively in the Shiite Muslim clerical establishment in Iran.   

But much of Iran’s top brass has been decimated in the latest conflict and Mojtaba has close ties with the powerful IRGC and the Basij volunteer paramilitary force.

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Roblox Introduces AI System That Rewrites Users’ Chat Messages in Real Time

Roblox has started rewriting its users’ chat messages in real time using AI, altering what people actually typed into something the platform considers more appropriate.

The feature, rolling out now, goes further than the existing filter that replaces flagged words with “#” symbols. Under the new system, banned language gets silently reworded into what Roblox calls “more respectful language that remains closer to the user’s original intent.”

The platform’s example: type “Hurry TF up!” and the message your recipient sees reads “Hurry up!” Roblox says everyone in the chat is notified when this happens, though the person who typed the original message has no way to stop the substitution before it goes out.

The definition of “banned language” extends beyond profanity. It covers “misspellings, special characters, or other methods to evade detection of profanity,” meaning the AI is also tasked with catching deliberate workarounds and rewriting those too.

Roblox is simultaneously expanding its text filtering system to “detect more variations of language that break its Community Standards,” so the net is getting wider at the same time, and the consequences of being caught in it are changing.

What Roblox has built is a system that goes beyond blocking speech. It replaces it. The message that leaves your keyboard is not the message that arrives. The recipient reads words you didn’t choose, attributed to you, with a notification that your original phrasing was deemed unacceptable. The platform decides what you said.

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Scientists Just Taught Lab-Grown Brain Cells to Play Video Games — and People Are Freaked Out

Researchers say they have successfully trained living human brain cells to play the classic video game Doom, marking the latest experiment in so-called “biological computing.”

Australian biotech company Cortical Labs announced the development in a recent demonstration showing neurons grown in a laboratory interacting with the 1993 first-person shooter.

The experiment builds on earlier work from 2022, when the company revealed that clusters of human brain cells grown in a petri dish had learned to play the much simpler video game Pong.

Those early experiments involved “mini-brains” made up of roughly 800,000 to one million living human neurons.

According to the company, the cells demonstrated the ability to adapt and learn basic tasks in real time.

Now researchers say they have taken the technology further by teaching the neurons to interact with the far more complex environment of Doom, a three-dimensional game that requires movement, targeting, and exploration.

To make the system work, engineers translated the digital signals from the game into patterns of electrical stimulation that the neurons could interpret.

“So we showed that biological neurons could play the game Pong,” Cortical Labs chief scientific officer Brett Kagan explained in a video announcement.

“This was a massive milestone because it demonstrated adaptive, real-time, goal-directed learning.”

“Doom was much more complex,” he added. “It’s 3D. It has enemies. It needs to explore, its an environment, and it’s hard.”

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Pro-Palestine Activists in Virginia Paint Watermelon Mural, Angering Black Residents Who Say it’s Racist

Pro-Palestinian activists in Richmond, Virginia have painted a watermelon mural on a local building. The seeds of the fruit are arranged to spell out ‘Free Palestine.’

The watermelon has long been a symbol of Palestinian activism, but it is also seen by many as a black stereotype and some black residents are not cool with the painting as a result.

This is a classic case of woke leftism being aligned with racist tropes and not even realizing it.

WWBT News reports:

Richmond mural supporting Palestine sparks debate over watermelon imagery in Black community

A mural is drawing attention from Black community leaders who say they don’t have a problem with the message, just the watermelon imagery.

The mural, at the intersection of Brookland Boulevard and North Avenue in Richmond’s Northside neighborhood, depicts a darker-skinned Palestinian woman holding a slice of watermelon, with the seeds spelling out “Free Palestine.”

Dr. Faedah Totah with Virginia Commonwealth University said the symbol traces back to 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip and banned the Palestinian flag.

“The Palestinian flag has four colors, red, white, black, and green, which also happens to be the color of a slice of a watermelon,” Totah said. “So, what ends up happening when you ban the flag is that people become creative in finding different ways to express their national identity.”…

The mural is located in a historically Black neighborhood undergoing gentrification. Jonathan Davis, the former president of the Richmond Crusade for Voters and also a former president of the Battery Park Civic Association, said the imagery gave him pause.

“I was taken aback because of the imagery that it represents, a watermelon up to the mouth of a Black woman,” Davis said. “So to me, understanding the history of our people and what happened during the Jim Crow era and how those images were used to demean us and make fun of us and ridicule us and run us out of the business, it really bothered me.”

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Israel Air Force strikes Iranian oil facilities, military source says

IDF sources confirmed to The Jerusalem Post on Saturday night that the air force has attacked significant oil resources in the Tehran region of Iran.

According to the sources, the oil resources being attacked are directly connected to Iran’s military industrial complex.

It was unclear what distinctions the IDF would make in such attacks regarding differing oil sites, but there was a clear effort by the sources to emphasize the military nature of the sites, which might otherwise be framed as harming Iran’s economic power more broadly, even if a new regime might later take over.

In the past, senior Israeli sources have told the Post that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has in recent years taken over certain portions of the economy, especially in the oil sector.

Iranian opposition reports indicated that as many as 30 sites might be under attack.

This vector of attack on the Islamic regime‘s power is the newest front after prior attacks on air defenses, ballistic missiles, top Iranian leaders, ballistic missile supply chain locations, and regime repression forces.

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When 7‑OH Fears Drive Policy by Anecdote

For generations, communities in Southeast Asia have used the leaves of Mitragyna speciosa — kratom — brewed as a drink to relieve pain and steady mood. Its principal alkaloids, mitragynine and the more potent 7‑hydroxymitragynine, act on opioid receptors and produce analgesic effects.

Kratom has since gained a significant presence in the United States, where consumers often use it as an alternative to prescription opioids or as a self-directed aid in managing withdrawal. It is sold in teas, capsules, powders, and concentrated extracts, with purified 7‑OH products increasingly appearing in vape shops, convenience stores, and online markets.

Regulators are now moving toward prohibition. Last July, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced plans to urge the Drug Enforcement Administration to place 7‑OH in Schedule I — the same legal category as heroin.

Supporters of these efforts argue that kratom — especially high-potency 7‑OH — could fuel the next wave of overdose deaths. But the data tell a different story.

Fatal overdoses in which 7‑OH has been implicated are exceedingly rare, and deaths linked to kratom more broadly are rarer still. In the limited cases where coroners listed kratom or 7‑OH as contributing factors, polysubstance use was the norm. Roughly two-thirds of decedents had fentanyl in their systems. About one-third had heroin present, and just under one-fifth had prescription opioids or cocaine. Around 80% had documented histories of substance misuse, and about 90% were not receiving clinical care for pain.

Each of these deaths is tragic, and any loss of life linked to psychoactive substances deserves careful scrutiny.

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U.S. Military-Industrial Complex Agrees To Quadruple Bomb Production As Operation Epic Fury Rages On

U.S. Central Command said late Friday on X that U.S. forces struck 3,000 IRGC targets with air-delivered munitions during the first week of Operation Epic Fury, signaling that the campaign is only intensifying as it moves into next week.

President Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday that he would not accept a negotiated end to the war with Iran, suggesting the conflict could drag on for some time. “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” he said.

We have reported that U.S. inventories of some critical munitions are running low, with U.S. forces scrambling for supplies of key air-defense interceptors as IRGC missiles and drones continue to target American and allied bases across Gulf states.

Dwindling supplies of critical munitions are being amplified by Ukraine’s continued need for interceptors amid relentless Russian missile and drone barrages, a major problem that likely prompted President Trump to host top U.S. defense manufacturers to discuss accelerating missile and bomb production.

“We just concluded a very good meeting with the largest U.S. Defense Manufacturing Companies where we discussed Production and Production Schedules,” Trump said on Truth Social late Friday afternoon.

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Epstein prison guard googled him minutes before body found — and made mysterious deposit before pedophile’s suicide: DOJ

One of Jeffrey Epstein’s prison guards googled the sex predator minutes before he was found dead — and also made a mysterious $5,000 cash deposit 10 days before the predator’s jail-cell suicide, new Department of Justice documents reveal.

Tova Noel was one of the two Metropolitan Correctional Center workers accused of falsifying records to say they checked on Epstein throughout the night before his Aug. 10, 2019, suicide.

The guards were fired but criminal charges against both were later dropped.

Noel googled “latest on Epstein in jail” at 5:42 a.m. and then again at 5:52 a.m. — less than 40 minutes before her colleague, correctional officer Michael Thomas, found the disgraced financier dead in his cell by hanging at 6:30 a.m., according to an FBI record of Noel’s internet search history that night.

Earlier that shift, Noel, 37, shopped for furniture online and snoozed on the job instead of making the mandated checks on Epstein every 30 minutes, while Thomas perused motorcycles, prosecutors said.

The FBI highlighted the eerie internet search in its 66-page forensic examination of the Bureau of Prisons desktop computers of Noel and Thomas. It was the only search highlighted.

When questioned during her sworn statement to the DOJ in 2021, Noel denied googling Epstein.

“I don’t remember doing that,” she claimed, according to a transcript. She said FBI records were not “accurate. I don’t recall looking him up.”

Noel, who has since been sued in Westchester County Supreme Court for alleged assault at her new job as a medical office assistant at Montefiore Einstein Advanced Care, also claimed to investigators that everyone at the Manhattan federal lockup failed to do rounds and falsified records about it.

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Canada set to surpass 100,000 assisted suicides — more than the country’s WWII death toll

Canada is set to pass a grim milestone in its medically-assisted suicide program with a total of 100,000 citizens projected to be euthanized by the government before its 10th anniversary on June 17.

The Great White North’s MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) program will soon cross the sickly six-figure threshold, according to The National Post.

Ottawa’s most recent data shows 15,767 Canadians were euthanized by the state in 2024 — 5.1% of all deaths in the nation that year.

About 45 Canucks per day are being euthanized, according to the report.

In 2021, a total of 9,842 Canadian people were euthanized.

Only 2,000 shelter dogs in Canada were put down that year, according to The Vet Desk.

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