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.

Vulnerable Dem Implodes When Pressed About Support for Socialism

Yes, there’s a congressional race on the Left Coast that Republicans could wrest away from Democrats. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) from Washington’s 3rd District is underwater in her race, not well-liked, and trailing her primary challengers. Washington goes by a top-two primary system: everyone from all parties is on the ballot, and the top two vote-getters advance to the general election. Perez is trying to lie low, keeping mum about the state income tax issue (via Oregon Public Radio): 

The race for Washington’s 3rd congressional district is expected to be one of the most competitive in the nation this fall, thanks to a wave of redistricting across the U.S. that has left few seats in play for either political party.

Washington state holds a “top-two primary,” which means that the top two vote-getters advance to the general election in November, regardless of party.

Yet as voters head into the Aug. 4 primary, experts predict a fiercely partisan general election, with an incumbent Democrat fighting to hold her seat against a state senator who’s been endorsed by President Donald Trump in a deeply purple district.

Two-term Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is favored in a field of four Democratic candidates. The frontrunner in a field of three GOP candidates appears to be state Sen. John Braun, a Trump favorite who represents a rural legislative district that includes northern Clark County.

Whoever emerges victorious will quickly find themselves at the heart of one of the fiercest and most closely watched Congressional races — one of just 18 seats without a likely outcome in November out of the entire 435-member House of Representatives, according to the Cook Political Report.

Perez knows she’s vulnerable, walking a waffled line on some issues, like this interview with a local NPR outlet, where she couldn’t handle questions about her ties and support for socialist causes. The FEC reports don’t lie; she’s taken in over $2 million from the MGP Victory Fund, which has ties to the Washington Democratic Party. It’s no shock, but lady, admit that you’re in with socialists, because that’s the state party platform. There’s a lot of Mamdani in these pages. 

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Epstein Model Recruiter Daniel Siad Found Dead in Home – He was NEVER Questioned by Investigators

Another key figure in the Jeffrey Epstein saga is dead.

Daniel Siad, the model recruiter accused of procuring young girls for convicted child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein, was found dead in his home in Colombes, France, earlier this week.

Marie-Céline Lawrysz, deputy public prosecutor at the Nanterre Judicial Court, confirmed the death in public statements on Wednesday. An autopsy will now be conducted to determine the cause of death.

The Nanterre prosecutor’s office said, via Mediaite:

“An investigation to determine the cause of death was opened on Monday evening following the discovery.”

Siad’s name appears thousands of times in Department of Justice files related to the Epstein case.

He continued working with Epstein even AFTER the billionaire was first convicted in Florida and forced to register as a sex offender.

According to the report, Siad’s exchanges with Epstein often consisted of Siad sending Epstein photos and details about young girls he had met and recruited as potential assistants or other workers. In one 2015 email, Siad sent Epstein a photo of a 16-year-old girl and her friend — and Epstein replied that the girls were “too old.”

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US Suspends Sending Funds to Virgin Islands Housing Authority, Citing Corruption

The U.S. government moved on July 20 to suspend funding for the U.S. Virgin Islands Housing Finance Authority after investigators uncovered what officials called widespread corruption, leaving residents still struggling to rebuild from the twin Category 5 hurricanes that slammed the territory nearly a decade ago.

Housing Secretary Scott Turner announced the suspension, saying an investigation by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) found “widespread financial mismanagement, inadequate fraud controls, false certifications and improper payments.” The probe remains ongoing.

Nine years after Congress approved $1.9 billion in disaster recovery money, the authority has spent just $570 million, representing less than one-third of the total.

“This failure has, to date, deprived Virgin Islanders of roughly $1.3 billion worth of assistance that Congress intended them to have,” the department stated in a July 20 letter to the head of the Virgin Islands Housing Finance Authority.

The letter went further, declaring that the authority’s “record demonstrates that it is an abysmal steward of taxpayer funds.”

The authority did not immediately return a request for comment.

The numbers show a stalled recovery. Investigators found that the authority completed only two of 95 planned single-family rental rehabilitation projects and none of 329 single- and multi-family housing projects. As of May, it had spent just 2 percent of its electrical grid recovery funding. At the same time, more than half the grant money set aside for administrative costs had already been spent.

The authority also sought $6.2 million in disaster-related funds that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had already paid.

Turner accused officials on social media of prioritizing “kickbacks over helping families recover from disasters.”

The authority’s former chief operating officer, Darin Richardson, who oversaw disaster recovery programs, is currently in federal prison after convictions on fraud and money-laundering charges. According to Turner, that official inflated a lumber contract meant to rebuild hurricane-damaged homes from $3 million to $4.5 million, took a $107,000 kickback, “and let the lumber rot in the sun, rendering it useless—a waste of taxpayer funds.”

In February, the executive director of the housing authority, Eugene Jones Jr., resigned as local legislators pressed questions about $4.2 million that remained untapped with a September spending deadline approaching. Virgin Islands State Sen. Kurt Vialet accused the former director of “just sitting there with a smug look.”

“The Housing Finance Authority is not building. You can’t be upset at senators being frustrated,” Vialet was quoted as saying by the St. Thomas Source, a local news site.

Hurricane Irma, a Category 5 storm, struck the U.S. Virgin Islands in September 2017. Roughly two weeks later, Hurricane Maria, also a Category 5, hit St. Croix. The territory has yet to fully recover.

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The World’s Biggest Shell Game

In 2001, Enron’s collapse revealed that a corporation could manufacture the appearance of financial health by creating thousands of shell companies, the purpose of which was to buy the real corporation’s toxic assets, keeping them hidden from investors and regulators. Enron created more than 3,000 such shell companies, officially dubbed “Special Purpose Vehicles” (SPV). When the shell game unraveled, $30 billion in hidden debt materialized overnight.

Lehman Brothers used this principle with “Repo 105,” temporarily moving $50 billion in assets off its balance sheet at quarter-end to SPVs, then retrieving them days later after reporting deadlines passed. Lehman’s bankruptcy examiner documented the fraud across 2,200 pages. No one went to prison.

Citigroup ran $80 billion through off-balance-sheet structured investment vehicles. When the commercial paper market froze in 2008, Citigroup had to re-absorb $58 billion, requiring a $45 billion government bailout. Bear Stearns created hedge fund SPVs housing toxic mortgage securities. When they imploded in 2007, they served as the canary in the coal mine for the entire financial system.

Bigger Than Corporations

The crucial question is: Does the same architecture operate at the level of nation-states? It does, through the mechanism of dollar reserve requirements and Treasury market structure.

Here is how it works. The United States issues Treasury bonds to finance deficit spending. Under the post-Bretton Woods dollar reserve system, central banks worldwide are expected (and in practice effectively required) to hold significant portions of their foreign exchange reserves in U.S. dollar-denominated assets, primarily Treasury securities. The Bank for International Settlements and International Monetary Fund frameworks for reserve adequacy create structural pressure on smaller countries to accumulate Treasuries as a demonstration of financial stability and as insurance against currency crises.

The result: Japan holds approximately $1.1 trillion in U.S. Treasuries. China holds approximately $760 billion. The United Kingdom, Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, Belgium, and Ireland each hold hundreds of billions. Together, foreign countries hold approximately $8.5 trillion of the $36 trillion U.S. national debt.

The Carrot and the Stick

These countries are not freely choosing to hold American debt the way a private investor chooses a stock. Many are incentivized, and in some cases coerced, into doing so by the international monetary system.

Countries that attempt to de-dollarize their reserves face currency instability, reduced access to dollar swap lines, and in some cases direct U.S. diplomatic and financial pressure. Iraq announced it would price oil in euros in 2000. Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi proposed a gold-backed African currency to replace the dollar for oil transactions. Both countries experienced U.S. military intervention shortly thereafter. Correlation is not causation, but the pattern has not gone unnoticed by smaller nations.

Without foreign central-bank demand structurally supporting the Treasury market, the interest rates required to attract voluntary buyers would be considerably higher. Foreign reserve requirements effectively subsidize American borrowing costs, suppress Treasury yields, and support the dollar’s reserve status in a mutually reinforcing cycle that benefits the issuer enormously.

Enron’s SPVs kept toxic assets off the balance sheet, allowing rating agencies such as Moody’s and S&P to maintain investment-grade ratings until days before the collapse. The structural foreign demand for Treasuries similarly influences how sovereign debt markets evaluate American creditworthiness. When Moody’s downgraded the United States from Aaa to Aa1 in May 2025, it cited the $36 trillion debt and deficit trajectory. But that downgrade was decades late relative to what the raw numbers would suggest.

Loss Is Inevitable

The difference between Enron’s SPVs and the sovereign SPV system is that Enron collapsed suddenly. The dollar reserve system is unwinding slowly — through BRICS de-dollarization efforts, bilateral currency swap agreements between China and trading partners, Saudi Arabia’s acceptance of yuan for oil sales, and the gradual diversification of central bank reserves away from Treasuries toward gold, which global central banks purchased at record rates in 2022, 2023, and 2024.

When enough of the SPV network decides to stop absorbing the parent’s liabilities, the parent’s true balance sheet becomes visible. What happened to Enron in 2001, and to Lehman in 2008, will eventually happen to any entity that has confused the appearance of solvency with its substance.

The shell game always ends the same way.

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Inspired by Trump, Israel Advances Plan for Crocodile-Ringed Prison for Palestinians

The Israeli government this week stripped Nile crocodiles of their protected status in order to advance a proposal that National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said was inspired by the Trump administration’s now-shuttered Alligator Alcatraz to build a prison for Palestinians surrounded by a moat full of the ravenous reptiles.

“You read that right,” the liberal US Jewish group J Street said in response to the news. “When cruelty becomes a governing principle instead of an aberration within the Israeli government, something has gone deeply wrong.”

Israeli Environmental Minister Idit Silman signed a directive Wednesday reclassifying Nile crocodiles as “specially managed wild animals,” a novel legal category enabling the government to keep them for security purposes.

Ben-Gvir, who heads the Israel Prison Service (IPS), said he was inspired by the Trump administration’s recently closed Alligator Alcatraz immigrant detention center in Florida. He is seeking to first introduce crocodiles into a moat around Ketziot Prison in southern Israel.

While it is not certain that the plan will come to fruition, Ben-Gvir celebrated Silman’s decree in a social media post showing him petting a crocodile, with the caption: “Cursed terrorist, thinking of trying to escape? Think again.”

Palestinians have occasionally escaped from Israeli lockups, such as in September 2021, when six men used improvised tools, including spoons, to tunnel out of the high-security Gilboa Prison. All six escapees were caught within weeks.

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‘Sip your coffee while watching the sunrise’: How Israel is colonizing the West Bank by selling Palestinian land to Jewish Americans

In mid-May, protesters gathered outside a synagogue in Brooklyn to demonstrate against a real estate expo being held inside. The properties advertised for sale were not located in New York City, but in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, and the target clientele was members of the Jewish American community. 

The “Great Israeli Real Estate Event,” organized by the Israeli company, My Home in Israel, was one of many property fares held across the U.S., Canada, and the UK, targeting prospective Anglophone Jewish buyers. A recently scheduled London event carrying the same name drew widespread condemnation last June from human rights groups and over 100 British lawmakers.

The settlements at the top of the event’s promoted property listings included Ma’ale Adumim, Givat Ze’ev, Karnei Shomron, and Kfar Eldad. Each listed area is undergoing urban expansion and new construction, concurrent with seizure and confiscation orders targeting the Palestinian lands surrounding them  — a systematic process aimed at entrenching settlement dominance.

The promotional advertising for these settlements deploys seductive language to attract investment. An advertisement for a real estate project in Kfar Eldad, located within the Gush Etzion Regional Council southeast of Bethlehem, pitches a rural lifestyle “close to Jerusalem, far from the routine.”  The ad reads: “Time flows a bit differently around here. In the morning you can sip your coffee while watching the sunrise, and just 12 minutes later, before your coffee has even cooled, find yourself in Jerusalem. And in the evening, you’ll return to soothing tranquility. This makes Kfar Eldad the perfect alternative for those seeking reasonably priced housing close to Jerusalem, but away from the noise and traffic of city life.”

Behind the glossy brochures and manicured images of “modern residential communities” lie painful chapters of systematic Palestinian land confiscation — a process that has expanded in recent years to encompass nearly half of the total area that Israeli occupation authorities have declared “state lands” since the Oslo Accords were signed.

The “soothing tranquility” in the hills and open terrain of Bethlehem was, until recently, home to Palestinian and Bedouin communities who practiced seasonal farming and herding. Those original inhabitants were barred from accessing their land, which was confiscated under military orders decades ago, before settlement projects were built on it.

“I owned land in the area of the Gush Etzion bloc’s expansion — land covered in hanging grapevines and almond trees of all kinds,” Ibrahim Ataallah, a resident of Khirbet Beit Skaria, told Mondoweiss. “But I was barred from accessing it after a confiscation order was issued [in 1984]. Even though we in Beit Skaria hold the legal documents proving ownership of the land we live on, they see us as an obstacle to the settlement expansion in Gush Etzion.”

As Atallah described the location of his plot of land, and the grapevines and almond trees it once bore, he looked at the maps and advertisements published by Hebrew real estate websites advertising properties in the Gush Etzion area. An advertisement describing the features of a plot for sale caught his eye. Though he could not pinpoint his own land on the map due to its lack of clarity, the descriptions of the land for sale and the lifestyle being offered to potential settlers hit close to home. 

“I really did drink my coffee at sunrise and waited for my friends from Jerusalem to join me,” he said. “We would talk about the price of grapes at the market, the coffee still warm by the time they arrived.”

“All that separates us from Jerusalem was a few kilometers,” he lamented. Today, that short distance no longer implies access. As a Palestinian ID holder, Atallah is barred from entering Jerusalem without a permit, transforming what was once a routine trip to visit friends into a near-impossible journey.

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ICE Arrests Illegal Previously Deported FIVE TIMES After Explicit Texts Sent to ICE Agent He Thought Was a 14-Year-Old Girl

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced the arrest of an illegal caught up in a sting operation.

Federico Pascual-Jimenez, from Mexico, thought he was sending sexually explicit text messages to a 14-year-old girl.

It was, in fact, an ICE agent.

In his texts, Pascual-Jimenez said he thought “age doesn’t matter.”

ICE announced on X, “.@ICEgov has ARRESTED a criminal illegal PEDOPHILE.”

“Federico Pascual-Jimenez, from Mexico, believed he was sending text messages to a 14-year-old girl who was actually an ICE agent. Pascual-Jimenez sent sexually explicit texts and said he thought ‘age doesn’t matter.’”

“This sicko’s criminal history includes a conviction for DUI, and he has been deported 5 TIMES in the past.”

“ICE is working with officials in South Dakota to ensure he is NEVER released into our streets again.”

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Biden-Appointed Judge Blocks Trump’s New Verification System to Remove Foreign Nationals from Voter Rolls

A federal judge, appointed by President Joe Biden, has blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from using an updated verification system, known as the SAVE program, to remove foreign nationals from state voter rolls.

On Monday, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, appointed to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia by Biden, issued an order to prevent the Trump administration from using a streamlined version of the federal government’s SAVE program to combat voter fraud.

The update to SAVE allowed states to more quickly verify that only American citizens are voting in federal elections by no longer requiring that all nine digits of a voter registrant’s Social Security Number have to be entered to verify eligibility.

“This case implicates two fundamental rights that protect Americans from government overreach: the right to privacy and the right to vote,” Sooknanan, an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago, wrote:

In the past year, several federal agencies have joined forces to create a centralized federal database that contains the private information of United States citizens, including Social Security numbers, citizenship status, and other sensitive data. [Emphasis added]

But decades ago, Congress put protections in place to prevent precisely this type of centralized data bank. And the record in this case shows that the federal agencies that created this database knew that the database violates those statutory protections. The agencies were scrambling to comply with an Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification. So they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable. Since then, states have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information. All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote. This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens. [Emphasis added]

A U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) spokesman previously told Breitbart News that the updated SAVE program was necessary to ensure “America’s elections are reserved exclusively for American citizens.”

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Democrats Put Ukraine Ahead Of American Troops 

Democrats seem more determined to keep the war in Ukraine going than to fund America’s war against Iran. The Pentagon says the Iran fight has cost about $37 billion, while nearly $200 billion has been poured into Ukraine.

That tells you everything about Washington’s broken priorities. Iran directly threatens America. Ukraine’s war needs to end. American troops and American security must come first.

Congressman Brandon Gill also exposed the Smithsonian’s eye-popping woke agenda, including racially charged propaganda involving Mickey Mouse.

Americans are paying for museums, not left-wing indoctrination.

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JAWBONE Act: FCC Democrat Backs Cruz Anti-Censorship Bill

FCC member Anna Gomez has been describing what happens when a federal regulator leans on broadcasters over programming it dislikes.

This month, she endorsed the JAWBONE Act, a Ted Cruz bill that would let the broadcasters and platforms on the receiving end of that pressure haul federal officials into court and collect money from them.

Punchbowl News reported the endorsement on July 14. The bill Gomez is backing, S. 4749, carries the name Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression, which nobody will ever say out loud, and it was introduced on June 11 by Cruz and Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden.

It would make it unlawful for any federal agency, or any officer or employee acting “under color or pretense of office or employment,” to coerce or attempt to coerce a broadcaster, an online platform or an AI provider into taking what the text calls a content action, meaning adding, altering or deleting speech.

Coercion is defined broadly as “to take a harmful, hostile, or unfavorable action, to imply the possibility of taking such action, or to threaten such action.”

The prohibition reaches conduct undertaken “for the purpose of, or if a reasonable person would understand the coercion or attempted coercion to be for the purpose of, incentivizing the broadcaster or provider to take a content action.”

The bill then lists eight factors a court should weigh in deciding whether something counts as coercion. Read them against the record built in Missouri v. Biden and the fit is almost exact.

Courts are told to consider the word choice and tone of the communication, whether the official had regulatory or enforcement authority over the recipient, whether the communication referred to adverse consequences, whether it was public or private, whether it carried a disclaimer saying it lacked legal force, and whether it led the recipient to act contrary to its own policies.

Two of the eight cut the government’s way, asking whether the communication carried “a factual statement without legal force that could be useful to the decision-making of the recipient” and whether it “was for the purpose of aiding compliance with existing law.”

The findings concede the point: “not all government communication to a private speech platform is coercive.” The government does not need a license over Facebook to have leverage over it. It has Section 230 and it has the antitrust division.

Consider what that leverage produced in the summer of 2021. Rob Flaherty, the White House director of digital strategy, ran a sustained campaign of emails and meetings aimed at Facebook’s moderation of COVID content.

The Fifth Circuit found he had demanded internal policy details at least twelve times, pressing the company on what content was being demoted, what interventions it was making, and what measurable impact any of it had.

He told the company the White House was “gravely concerned” that Facebook was “one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy,” accused it of running a “shell game,” and, when an answer was slow, wrote: “Are you guys fucking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.”

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