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.

Underwater drones are changing naval warfare around the globe

Underwater drones are rapidly emerging as a new frontier in naval warfare, with militaries deploying robotic submarines to conduct surveillance, hunt underwater mines and potentially attack enemy vessels.

American underwater drones have already operated during the Iran War, while countries across Europe and the Pacific are developing increasingly sophisticated unmanned submarines capable of carrying weapons. France became the latest country to embrace the technology Tuesday, awarding shipbuilder Naval Group a contract to develop a large autonomous combat submarine with sea trials scheduled for 2028, according to the French Defense Innovation Agency.

Naval Group did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The growing military importance of underwater drones became apparent in September when Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps captured an American-built Anduril Dive-LD near the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz.

The autonomous submarine had malfunctioned more than a day before Iranian forces recovered it while surveying regional waters in support of American military operations, U.S. Central Command spokesman Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins told DefenseScoop.

Photographs showing the American-made Anduril Dive-LD submarine drone recovered by Iranian forces near the Strait of Hormuz were posted on X by the open-source intelligence account OSINTdefender on Sept. 8.

Anduril did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The captured drone was an older model that carried no classified sonar or radar equipment, Hawkins said. Nevertheless, its recovery provided a rare glimpse into the American military’s use of underwater robots during the conflict, according to DefenseScoop.

The Anduril Dive-LD measures approximately 19 feet long, can operate autonomously for up to 10 days and is designed to reach depths of 6,000 meters, according to Anduril.

The submarine can conduct seabed mapping and mine warfare while carrying interchangeable sensors and other mission equipment, according to Anduril.

The company defended the loss, explaining that the platform was designed for dangerous missions where losing equipment was an accepted risk. The drone had already accumulated thousands of operational hours during months of CENTCOM missions, an Anduril spokesperson told DefenseScoop.

Underwater drones have also become part of American efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz after Iranian forces deployed naval mines throughout the strategic waterway.

The U.S. military announced in April that underwater drones would join mine-clearance operations intended to establish safe shipping corridors through the strait, according to CENTCOM.

The Pentagon has also invested in substantially larger autonomous submarines, including Boeing’s Orca, an unmanned diesel-electric vessel designed for extended missions without a human crew. The Navy accepted its first Orca test vehicle in December 2023, according to Naval Sea Systems Command.

Across the Pacific, Australia has committed approximately 1.7 billion Australian dollars, or $1.19 billion USD, to acquiring a fleet of Anduril Ghost Shark underwater drones capable of conducting surveillance, reconnaissance and strike operations, according to the Australian Defense Ministry.

Australian officials announced additional progress in October, revealing specialized payloads for unmanned underwater vehicles designed to transport supplies, deploy naval mines and launch aerial drones, according to the Australian Defense Ministry.

Britain has already demonstrated the potential for underwater drones to launch conventional submarine weapons.

The Royal Navy successfully fired an inert American Mk48 heavyweight torpedo from its 12-meter-long unmanned submarine Excalibur during September trials off Scotland, according to the Royal Navy.

Ukraine has gone further, claiming to have used explosive underwater drones to attack a Russian Kilo-class submarine inside the port of Novorossiysk in December 2025. The operation involved a domestically developed system called Sub Sea Baby, according to the Security Service of Ukraine.

Ukrainian officials claimed the explosion disabled the submarine, although Moscow denied the reported damage, Reuters reported.

China is developing increasingly sophisticated underwater systems, including autonomous drones capable of locating submerged explosives and operating in areas with extremely poor visibility, according to China Military Online.

Turkey has developed its own autonomous underwater mine-hunting platform, the STM NETA 300, capable of identifying submerged threats at depths of up to 300 meters, according to defense manufacturer STM.

The rapid proliferation of underwater drones could fundamentally alter naval combat by allowing militaries to patrol contested waters and deploy weapons without risking human crews. However, the American drone captured by Iran also demonstrates that increasingly widespread autonomous systems can fall into enemy hands when missions go wrong.

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Newly Elected Democrat Arrested for Killing Someone Just One Day after Being Elected

An Iowa judge was arrested on felony charges just one day after voters approved keeping her on the bench, following a crash that killed one pedestrian and seriously injured another. District Associate Judge Lynn Poschner, 45, was arrested November 4th, 2026. She faces charges of homicide by vehicle and serious injury by vehicle, both involving allegations of reckless driving. The collision occurred weeks before Election Day.

The crash happened September 25th on 86th Street north of Aurora Avenue in Urbandale. Police responded around 9:15 p.m. after a vehicle struck two people crossing the street, and both pedestrians were transported to a hospital with serious injuries. The driver remained at the scene. One of those struck, 60-year-old Urbandale resident Jasmira Kadic, died from her injuries October 28th.

Poschner’s name appeared on the November 3rd ballot for a judicial retention vote in Polk County. Unofficial results showed 95,762 votes in favor of keeping her in office and 43,313 against, giving her approximately 68.9% support. Voters were deciding whether the incumbent should remain in her position, with a yes vote supporting retention and a no vote opposing it.

Those election totals were published by SpectrumVote. According to a criminal complaint described in Iowa Public Radio’s reporting, Poschner told police she looked down at her phone and tapped the screen to adjust audio through her vehicle before hitting the pedestrians. She said she didn’t see them. Investigators subsequently examined the phone and found its screen had been on and unlocked around the time of the collision.

Poschner had served on the bench for years before the election. Her Iowa Judicial Branch biography lists her appointment as May 2018 and identifies her position as district associate judge in District 5C, which covers Polk County. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Northern Iowa in 2003. She graduated from Drake Law School with high honors in 2007 and worked in private practice before becoming a judge.

Libs of TikTok drew attention to the arrest in a post on X, identifying Poschner as a Democrat and emphasizing the timing of her arrest. “She allegedly admitted to police that she had been looking at her phone and did not see the pedestrians,” the account wrote. A 2020 Iowa judicial voting guide also listed her political affiliation as Democrat. Her judicial retention election was nonpartisan.

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Ohio Woman ‘Did What She Had to Do to Save Her Life’ but Still Faces Charges

On Halloween night, a woman named Deryka Minor suffered a vicious assault at a Cincinnati nightclub. According to Minor’s attorney Clyde Bennett, 20-year-old Kameiro Blair-Martin, who worked at the nightclub as a barback and busser, assaulted his client.

Bennett says Blair-Martin punched Minor in the face at least 15 or 16 times, leaving her close to losing consciousness. As the beating continued, he allegedly reached toward his waistband in a manner that Minor interpreted as an attempt to draw a firearm.

That’s when Minor drew her own handgun and fired one shot, striking and killing Blair-Martin.

According to Bennett, Blair-Martin was armed and that a gun was subsequently recovered beside him. Bennett says Minor had never met Blair-Martin and still does not know why he attacked her.

During a court hearing last Wednesday, a Cincinnati police detective agreed that Minor was the victim of an assault and acted to defend herself. Blair-Martin’s homicide has been deemed a justifiable use of deadly force, but Minor still faces charges for unlawfully carrying a concealed firearm because she’s not old enough to lawfully carry one.

Just like her assailant, Deryka Minor is 20 years old. And under Ohio law, you must be 21 to carry, with or without a valid carry license. Unlawful concealed carry of a loaded firearm, or one with ammunition readily available, is a fourth-degree felony in the Buckeye State. It’s also a third-degree felony to unlawfully carry a concealed handgun in an establishment where liquor is served on the premises. Assuming the business hadn’t posted signage declaring it a “gun-free zone,” a 21-year-old could have lawfully brought a gun into Memories Lounge, but it was against the law for Minor to do so.

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NYC Rapper “Principal” Collects Nearly $200,000 for a School That Never Opened

This is ludicrous. A 33-year-old New York City Department of Education administrator is pocketing a principal’s salary of $192,374 a year for running a high school that does not exist and was never approved.

Caleb Haraguchi-Combs, who also performs as the rapper Cal Combs, was handpicked in January to serve as project director of the proposed Next Generation Technology High School in Lower Manhattan. The promotion came with a $50,000 raise from his prior assistant principal pay of $141,960 at Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics in East Harlem.

Months later the school is dead, he is not assigned to any actual campus, and the checks keep clearing.

Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels killed the proposal in April after opposition over its merit-based admissions model and broader anxiety about artificial intelligence in classrooms. The planned FiDi school was supposed to focus on AI and computer technology. Instead it became another casualty of the city’s allergy to anything resembling rigorous standards.

A project director of a planned school normally becomes its principal once doors open. That never happened here. According to the New York Post, a DOE source said officials “never should have named a principal before the school was approved” and that, without tenure, such appointees are typically returned to assistant principal roles when a project collapses. Haraguchi-Combs never served as principal long enough to seek tenure in the role.

The Department of Education’s official line is that he is “developing new proposals and supporting in-progress proposals.” A DOE insider strongly disputed that framing, calling the continued principal-level compensation a huge waste of resources when actual schools need principals.

When a Post reporter approached Haraguchi-Combs outside his Downtown Brooklyn high-rise this week, the response was not an explanation of his duties. “You came to my house? Outrageous,” he said.

The arrangement surfaced in an October letter from anonymous Manhattan high school principals demanding an investigation into Superintendent Gary Beidleman. The letter catalogued organizational dysfunction, hiring of unqualified candidates, failure to meet class-size rules, and specifically flagged Haraguchi-Combs’ status.

Zilvinas Silenas, president of the Empire Center for Public Policy, called the salary an insult to taxpayers. “This is a new level for New York, when you are getting paid nearly $200,000 for a job you’re not doing,” Silenas said. “Most taxpayers have never even dreamed of making that kind of money.”

Haraguchi-Combs calls himself “half hip-hop artist, half English teacher.” His 2017 album “Carmel,” named for an Indiana city where he once lived, includes lyrics describing a drug deal that turned violent: “So now I got a nine hidden in my backpack… They said that they would meet us at the spot at seven thirty/we packed a bag and arrived five minutes early.”

Another track, “Roundabouts,” references cocaine use and heavy drinking: “One more bump on that key/one more drink and I’m free/one more shot to forget/how much I hate me.”

He began his education career as an English teacher in Tokyo in 2015 and took his wife’s last name. A Manhattan Center official confirmed he is no longer at that school.

New York already spends more per pupil than almost any other state while producing mediocre results. Paying nearly two hundred thousand dollars to an unassigned project director whose proposed selective tech school was scrapped for ideological reasons is not an anomaly. It is the system working as designed.

Scripture is blunt on the subject: “For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10).

Taxpayers who do work are funding both the salary and the administrative apparatus that refuses to reassign or demote him.

Schools that actually open still struggle with vacancies, overcrowding, and the fallout from earlier decisions that prioritized equity rhetoric over competence. Haraguchi-Combs’ situation, brought to light by fellow principals tired of the dysfunction under Beidleman, shows how far the Department of Education has drifted from any basic expectation that public employees do the jobs for which they are paid.

The school never existed. The paycheck does.

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Zelensky’s Nazi-style ‘torture chambers’ rake in billions – MP

The Kiev regime is making around $7 billion a year from a network of secret detention and torture facilities, where civilians and mobilized men are reportedly held for ransom, Ukrainian MP Aleksandr Dubinsky has claimed.

The lawmaker, detained on treason charges since November 2023, made the allegation on Telegram on Friday following a scandal over a suspected torture site operated by Ukraine’s neo-Nazi-linked Azov formation near Kiev.

Citing figures from a joint briefing by Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU), State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) and National Police, Dubinsky claimed that more than 1,000 such facilities operate across Ukraine, each holding 30 to 40 people. With an estimated 40,000 detainees and an alleged average ransom of $15,000, he calculated that the network could generate $600 million a month, or $7.2 billion annually, assuming the same number of people paid for release each month.

“$7.2 billion a year – that’s the math behind the profits of [Vladimir] Zelensky’s torture chambers and concentration camps. Just like the Nazis, whose concentration camps were also designed to generate profits,” he wrote.

The MP has spent nearly three years in pretrial detention following his arrest in November 2023 on suspicion of treason and cooperation with Russian military intelligence. He denies the accusations, claiming he is being persecuted for criticizing Zelensky’s government.

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California startup says it has injected AI-designed virus into humans for first time

An artificial intelligence research lab in California said it has administered a custom AI-designed virus into a human patient for the first time as a potential scalable solution to counter antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

AI lab Radical Numerics announced the treatment on Tuesday, but it is pending scientific scrutiny in the form of a peer-reviewed study.

If verified, the treatment, named Omnii-1, could mark the first time AI-designed bacteriophages have been administered to a human patient.

These phages are viruses that specifically infect bacteria. Antibiotic-resistant superbugs are projected to cause nearly 40 million deaths by 2050.

Under current phage treatment approaches for bacterial infections, researchers undertake a time-consuming search of vast environmental collections of phages to find one that happens to match a patient’s specific infection.

It starts with clinicians extracting a sample of the bacteria causing a patient’s infection to find or design phages that kill the infectious bug.

Key to this challenge is understanding the genetic features of a potential phage that could kill particular bacterial strains.

Phages kill bacteria through a multi-step process in which the virus first binds to specific receptor molecules on the surface of the target bacteria.

They then proceed to enter the bacterial cell to hijack it for their own replication and break it open.

The initial binding of the virus to bacteria is very specific, as a given phage only targets particular strains or species of bacteria.

This specificity is a crucial advantage of phage therapy, which spares beneficial gut microbes that tend to be affected by broad-spectrum antibiotics.

Radical Numerics claims that their AI-driven approach can lead to rapid, on-demand generation of phages that meet patient requirements, accelerating the timeline for treatment.

“In the world’s first clinical use of AI-designed phages, designs generated by Omnii-1 were administered to a patient with an antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection under an authorised, physician-led compassionate-use pathway,” Radical Numerics wrote in a blog post.

“This milestone marks an early step toward translating AI-guided genome design into personalised therapies,” it said.

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Robot successfully builds space structure in first autonomous construction demo

A robotic truss builder that was conceived, designed and built by Caltech researchers has successfully built a structure in space—without the help of astronauts—for the first time. The truss builder, part of DARPA’s Novel Orbital and Moon Manufacturing, Materials, and Mass-efficient Design (NOM4D) program, consists of an autonomous manipulator that picks up struts and joints held in nearby dispensers to repeatedly assemble identical sections, or bays, of a perimeter truss.

“This is the first time that a structure has been autonomously constructed in space,” says Sergio Pellegrino, the Joyce and Krent Kresa Professor of Aerospace and Civil Engineering, the Lynn Booth and Kent Kresa Department of Aerospace Leadership Chair, the executive officer for aerospace and a senior research scientist at JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA.

Pellegrino is team leader of Caltech’s Autonomous In-Space Tensioned Reflector Assembly (ASTRA) demonstration, a robotic builder that has spent the last six months in space, working to construct a 1.4-meter-diameter (4.6-foot-diameter) reflector antenna from composite fiber tubes, aluminum joints and a Kapton reflective surface.

According to DARPA, the autonomous robotic assembly is akin to piecing together a high-tech K’Nex or Tinkertoy structure. But the process of automating the build in space is nothing like child’s play.

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European Commission Says TikTok Recommendation Algorithm Breaches Censorship Law

The European Commission (EC) is once again going after TikTok, this time in a more brazen way, over its “For You” feed that it says is harmful to “vulnerable adults and minors.”

On Friday, November 6, the EU’s executive arm preliminarily found that the way the feed is designed and functions is in breach of the Digital Services Act (DSA), a controversial online censorship and age verification law.

The Commission says the algorithm behind it creates a “rabbit hole effect” – and this is the first time it has cited a recommendation algorithm as the reason for a breach.

TikTok’s “For You” feed works in a way that “the more a user interacts with a certain type of content, the more TikTok’s ‘For You’ feed algorithm recommends similar content.”

According to the EC, this “can be harmful when such endless and repeated exposure involves, for example, content about sadness, isolation or body image.”

The Commission’s “investigation” focused on legal content – meaning that there is no doubt that what is shown in the videos is lawful – but the regulator has a problem with the frequency of such content being shown to users.

As officials told the press, a single video of this kind might not be problematic, but many of them, one after the other, could be. The Commission is essentially saying that it has the right to decide what and how many videos of a particular, lawful topic an adult is allowed to watch.

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The finding does not only concern minors – it explicitly mentions “vulnerable adults” as well. An official said that “We are addressing a business model.”

TikTok, the Commission says, needs to “change the design of the ‘For You’ feed” – and the Commission has some ideas on how to do it: “rely more on users’ explicit preferences, disable viewing time as an indicator to recommend content, increase the accessibility and usability of user controls, and regularly test its algorithm.”

The “not interested” button that users can click on videos they don’t want to see “may not be enough to change the content feed” – and the fact that people repeatedly watch or like a video is taken as a sign that they want to see more of the same.

In the Commission’s own words, “The system interprets these interactions as positive signs of interest and recommends more of the same.”

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Ex-CIA Officer Says The Agency Delivered The Same Iran Verdict Three Times Before The War

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou says the agency produced three separate national intelligence estimates before the Iran war began, and each one found that Tehran had no nuclear weapons program. He made the claim on the Nov. 6 “Intelligence Community Roundtable” edition of Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Judging Freedom, alongside Larry Johnson.

Napolitano asked what the CIA had told the president “about the practical consequences of his plan with Netanyahu to win the war in six days.” Kiriakou answered that “we know a little bit from leaks,” then said: “the CIA had published three separate national intelligence estimates and all three times concluded that the Iranians did not have a nuclear weapons program. It just simply didn’t exist.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress in March 2025 that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon,” and Trump answered that he didn’t “care what she said.”

Kiriakou said the agency’s analysts were just as consistent on what a war would cost. “The CIA was pretty consistent that this was a bad idea from the very beginning,” he said, arguing that the analysis held “the Iranians were far tougher than we as policymakers believed.” In his telling, a look at the map was enough: Iran is “the size as the whole of Western Europe,” ringed by mountains on three sides, with “92 million people, all of whom will go to their deaths to protect their homeland.” Conquering it, he said, would have taken “one million ground troops.”

He also pointed to a leak from “less than three weeks ago.” A CIA “red cell” team, the kind of group meant to “think outside the box,” had concluded that “it was Israel that could break up and fall apart and cease to exist because of all of this, not Iran,” Kiriakou said. The person who leaked it, he said, was a CIA contractor who passed it to his girlfriend, who put it in her blog. That matches the case of Ian Brinksman, the contractor the FBI arrested last month, as we reported. His case is ongoing, and Kiriakou’s account of what the red cell concluded rests on the leaked reporting, not on a document we have seen.

The segment was part of a broader hour in which Johnson and Kiriakou argued that Trump’s Iran policy cost Republicans in Tuesday’s midterms. Both are known critics of the war, and the claims above are theirs.

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Election Worker Claims Republican Votes for Andy Biggs Were Discarded During Ballot Adjudication — Over 54% of Adjudicated Ballots Flagged as Overvotes

A stunning message from an inside adjudicator at the Maricopa County Ballot Tabulation Center (BTC) is raising fresh red flags about the 2026 Arizona gubernatorial race, where Democrat Katie Hobbs was declared the winner over Trump-endorsed Republican Rep. Andy Biggs.

Rachel Alexander, a journalist for Townhall and Arizona Insiders (and a former Maricopa County elections attorney and prosecutor), shared the account on X. The source, identifying as a working adjudicator, described ongoing anomalies targeting Republican ballots.

Alexander wrote on X:

“Nothing to see here, and the MaRICOpa County Supervisors wouldn’t let anyone investigate anyway. I received this message from someone:

Hi. I am working as an adjudicator in the Maricopa County BTC. There are and continue to be anomalies in adjudication. What we are seeing is Republican ballots that were voted Biggs but also voted Hobbs. With an X through the Biggs vote. This takes the ballot to adjudication as an over vote. Adjudicators will then remove the Biggs vote because the X shows voter intent to change their mind. The vote goes to Hobbs. We have also been seeing votes for Biggs and Lombardo together. Creating another over vote. Only this time the Biggs vote isnt counted and neither is Lombardo. This is how they stole votes and shaved votes imho. The anomalies also appear on Prop 144 and others. There is something going on with adjudication. The ballots were stored in a hallway that wasn’t secure, boxes an…”

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