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.

Who Really Controls Interest Rates?

People constantly ask who has more power over interest rates, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent or Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh. Warsh certainly has the more visible lever because the Federal Reserve controls the federal funds target and can influence short-term liquidity throughout the banking system. Bessent, however, sits at the Treasury where the government must actually finance the deficits Congress creates. Congress spends the money, the Treasury must borrow it, and the Fed attempts to influence the price of money, but NONE of them ultimately control global capital.

This is the great misconception surrounding the Federal Reserve. No Fed chairman controls the business cycle. Warsh can raise or lower the overnight rate, but he cannot simply decree that the 10-year Treasury should yield 3% if investors around the world demand 5%. The long end of the curve reflects inflation expectations, sovereign risk, competing investment opportunities, debt supply, and international capital flows. The Fed can intervene and buy bonds, but then it risks expanding liquidity and creating precisely the inflation it claims to be fighting.

Bessent faces the opposite side of the same problem. Treasury must continuously sell enormous quantities of debt because Washington has accumulated more than $40 trillion in obligations and continues running deficits. Bessent can alter maturities, conduct buybacks, and attempt to improve liquidity, but he cannot FORCE investors to finance Washington at the yield he prefers. If global capital demands greater compensation for holding U.S. government debt, then the Treasury eventually has to pay the market price.

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CAIR Scandal: Which Islamist Groups Received Biden Administration Funding?

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is reviewing whether the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) misused federal grants intended for Afghan refugees. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the review on June 9, 2026. It covers CAIR National and its California and Washington affiliates.

The review followed an April 27 letter from Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) and 13 other House Republicans urging HHS to suspend CAIR and begin debarment proceedings to bar it from federal grants government-wide. Under federal regulations, debarment generally lasts no more than three years, though the debarring official may impose a longer period if circumstances warrant.

CAIR describes itself as the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization. Concerns about the group stem largely from the federal prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation, a Texas charity accused of funneling more than $12 million to Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. In 2008, five former officials were convicted on 108 counts.

Prosecutors named CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator. U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis denied its request to remove its name from the list. In a July 2009 order, he wrote that the government had produced “ample evidence” establishing CAIR’s associations with the Holy Land Foundation, the Islamic Association for Palestine, and Hamas. Ghassan Elashi, a CAIR-Texas figure, was among those convicted and was sentenced to 65 years for financing terrorism.

In April 2009, the FBI said it had suspended formal contacts with CAIR and would not treat it as a liaison partner until it could resolve whether the group or its executives remained connected to Hamas. CAIR denies any ties to terrorism.

CAIR is not the only Islamist organization to receive HHS funding. A July 2026 Middle East Forum audit identified 14 organizations it describes as Islamist or terror-linked that received $79 million in HHS funding since 2010. According to the audit, 87 percent, about $68.5 million, was awarded between 2022 and 2025. Federal award records show that at least eight received funding during the Biden administration, while four foreign recipients received money through awards signed before 2021. Each of the 14 groups is examined below.

CAIR chapters received about $42.2 million in HHS-funded Afghan resettlement grants through state agencies and private organizations since July 2022. This included $40.7 million for CAIR-California and about $1.5 million for chapters in Washington and Oklahoma.

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The Alert Level For The Iranian Military Has Been Raised To The Highest Possible Level As A Massive Escalation Appears To Be Imminent

The Great Middle East War is poised to escalate to an entirely new level, and that could have huge implications for the entire planet. Diesel prices are already spiraling out of control, and strict energy rationing measures are already being implemented in impoverished nations such as Pakistan. Unfortunately, it appears that another round of fighting could be about to erupt in the Middle East. Within the past 24 hours, there have been a lot of rumors that the alert level for the Iranian military has been raised to the highest level possible. According to a major Iranian news agency, these rumors are accurate…

Why is this happening now?

Well, things have gotten quite crazy in the region over the past several days.

On Saturday, the Houthis crossed a very clear red line by firing missiles at the capital city of Saudi Arabia…

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Senator Says Hegseth Barred Him From Gulf Base to ‘Cover Up the True Cost’ of Iran War

A US senator visiting the Persian Gulf said Tuesday that the Pentagon blocked him from inspecting a heavily damaged American military installation and refused to arrange a briefing on the Iran War, accusing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of mounting an “unprecedented” effort to conceal the conflict’s costs and consequences from lawmakers and the public.

“This trip confirmed for me that there is an active, unprecedented, unconstitutional effort underway to hide the costs of this war and the implications of this war from Congress and the American people,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told reporters Tuesday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Murphy said he sought to inspect Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest US military installation in the Middle East and a crucial hub for American operations in the region. The base was struck by Iranian missiles during the opening days of the war and sustained heavy damage, including a direct hit to its Combined Air Operations Center.

“I’ve never encountered anything like this in my time in the Senate,” the senator said, describing the Pentagon’s actions as “part of a deliberate campaign of obfuscation that my Republican colleagues in Congress should demand an end to.”

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Somali Mayor of City in Minnesota Wants to Solve Problem of Somali Gang Violence by Banning Guns

Nadia Mohamed is the Somali mayor of the city of St. Louis Park in Minnesota. In a recent video, which you can view below, she suggests that the way to end Somali gang violence is to ban guns outright.

Is she familiar with the United States Constitution?

You will notice that she spends the first part of the video trying to equivocate and gloss over who is committing these violent crimes by saying crime is crime and it doesn’t really matter who is doing it.

The Daily Wire has details:

St. Louis Park, Minnesota, Mayor Nadia Mohamed, the first Somali elected mayor in the United States, called for a gun ban after a shooting linked to Somali gangs forced a high school to cancel its homecoming dance.

Minnesota’s Eden Prairie High School, which is just southwest of St. Louis Park, canceled its homecoming dance after a shooting that authorities believe involved Somali gangs left two people injured outside the school’s football stadium Friday night.

“We can definitely talk about this issue without making it a Somali issue,” Mohamed said. “Without making it all about Somalis, and how Somali gangs, and Somali this, and Somali that. … The rhetoric that you are pushing at best is irresponsible, at worst is dangerous.”

“You may be wondering, ‘Hey mayor, how can we solve for this?’ … The answer is easy, ban guns,” she added.

Mohammad’s policy suggestion is what she is hoping other people begin to do. “To pick on a community that is already revealing from anti-Somali rhetoric is low-hanging fruit,” she said. “Let’s talk about policy.”

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Assisted Suicide in Canada: Beware the Slippery Slope

verywhere that assisted suicide has been legalized, critics have warned that, however tight the initial restrictions limiting the use of this so-called process may at first be, its legalization could become the beginning of a slippery slope. Canada was not the first country to legalize assisted suicide. But Canada is presently the poster child for what the slippery slope looks like. Although Canada’s Criminal Code, which governs this procedure, originally required two witnesses to the application it was subsequently amended to require only one. For those who are curious as to where the slippery slope can ultimately lead, a recent case has spelled this out quite clearly: it leads to a criminal investigation.

The term assisted suicide is an oxymoron. Unless one dies of illness, old age, or accident, there are only two ways by which a life may be ended, both of which are defined by agency. If one dies by one’s own hand, then it is a suicide; if by the hand of another, then it is a homicide. But reality is not that simple. Since the assisted suicide process in its various forms was introduced, both the morality and legality of the matter turn on one thing: the patient’s consent. The public is divided on the morality of the process, but the one thing that the public and the law are not divided about is the issue of consent. Everything depends on the patient’s desire and ability to give consent. That is the issue at the heart of the criminal investigation.

Brigitte Stegemann — affectionately known by her family as “GG” — was an eighty-three-year-old grandmother from a devout Christian family. For twelve years, her namesake granddaughter, Brigitte Kranendonk, was GG’s medical advocate and also had Power of Attorney. For the last two years of her life, GG was a resident of a nursing home in the town of Belleville, Ontario. Towards the end of her life, she had some issues in understanding what people were saying to her, in part because she was deaf in one ear as well as partially deaf in the other, and also due to cognitive decline. But her granddaughter Brigitte was always capable of clearly communicating with her even through a medical mask. Therefore, during the two years that GG had been a resident of the home, staff had constantly consulted with her on all matters of care. About five months before her death, GG was diagnosed with terminal stage-four stomach cancer. The possibility of assisted suicide was then raised with Brigitte present, and it was determined that GG did not want to go that route due to her Christian faith.

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DNC Sues Trump Administration Alleging Illegal Propaganda Campaign

The Democratic National Committee sued the Trump administration on Wednesday, accusing it of using taxpayer funding to craft political advertisements ahead of November’s midterm elections.

The DNC filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleging that millions of dollars were spent on what amounts to government propaganda, according to the Associated Press.

The DNC complaint also claimed that Trump personally directed the ads and wants the court to declare them illegal.

This comes despite Trump saying on Monday that he would pay for future ads using his super PAC, adding that they are a “positive promotion for our Great U.S.A.”

The ads began airing in September and are estimated to have cost $12 million so far.

DNC Chair Ken Martin said this is Trump’s “last-ditch attempt to save Republicans in November.”

“Americans deserve better than to have their hard-earned tax dollars used for Trump’s illegal schemes,” he declared.

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Military Judge Throws Out Confessions of Fourth Defendant in 9/11 Case

A military judge on Wednesday tossed out the confessions of a fourth defendant in the government’s 9/11 case.

3,000 Americans were killed in the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, the Pentagon, and a downed plane in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Walid bin Attash is accused of helping train two of the hijackers.

“Tell the judge that I am very proud for my part in the Planes Operation,” Walid bin Attash said to federal agents on January 24, 2007 — the first day of the interrogations, according to The New York Times.

The judge, Lt. Col Michael Schrama, ruled that bin Attash’s previous confessions to the CIA were coerced and therefore not admissible.

This is the latest blow to the federal government.

The New York Times reported:

The judge in the Sept. 11 case on Wednesday excluded the last disputed confessions of a prisoner accused of conspiring in the attacks, once again denying prosecutors evidence they had defended for years as crucial to the case.

The statements were obtained through a program designed by Bush administration lawyers in 2007 because the defendants’ previous statements to the C.I.A. were considered coerced and could not be used against them.

But for the fifth time, a military judge found that confessions obtained by federal agents on so-called clean teams were not admissible.

Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, the judge, ruled that the agents failed to notify Walid bin Attash that what the C.I.A. extracted from him from 2003 to 2006 in forced interrogations could not be used against him. The judge also found that when F.B.I. agents brought treats to their interrogation room to gain Mr. bin Attash’s cooperation they were copying a technique sometimes used by the C.I.A. to keep a prisoner confessing.

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By Netanyahu’s Own Math, Gaza Is 3,900 September 11ths

Benjamin Netanyahu likes to translate Israel’s grief into American. At the United Nations last month, he took the dead of October 7 and multiplied them by the ratio of America’s population to Israel’s. The 1,200 Israelis killed that day, he said, were “equal to 40,000 innocent Americans slaughtered in less than 24 hours. That’s 16 times 9/11.”

Per-capita comparisons are a perfectly legitimate tool. A small country feels a massacre more than a large one, and Americans should understand what October 7 meant to Israelis. But a method is only honest if you’re willing to apply it to everyone. So let’s apply Netanyahu’s method to the people his army has been killing for three years.

Gaza had about 2.2 million people before the war. The United States has about 341 million, roughly 155 times as many. Take a conservative figure of 75,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, slightly above the Gaza Health Ministry’s latest count of more than 73,000. Multiply it by Netanyahu’s own logic, and you get about 11.6 million Americans.

Eleven point six million. That is roughly the population of Ohio. It is more than ten times the number of Americans killed in every war the United States has ever fought, from the Revolution to Afghanistan. It is about 15 times America’s deaths in the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in the nation’s history.

Measured in the unit Netanyahu chose, it is about 3,900 September 11ths.

Run the numbers in Israel’s own terms and the result is the same. Seventy-five thousand dead in a population of 2.2 million is the equivalent of about 340,000 Israelis. Netanyahu built a speech, a war and a foreign policy on 1,200. Imagine what he would say about 340,000.

The convenient multiplier

The prime minister’s defenders will object that the comparison is unfair because many of Gaza’s dead were Hamas fighters. Fine. Subtract every combatant the Israeli military claims to have killed, and apply the multiplier to what remains. Even 50,000 dead becomes nearly 8 million Americans, about 2,600 9/11s. You can argue over every death in the ledger, and the result is still measured in millions.

Netanyahu’s arithmetic has problems even on its own terms. Forty thousand Americans divided by the 2,977 who died on September 11 comes to about 13.4 9/11s, not 16. When the rhetoric needs a bigger number, it seems, the calculator rounds up.

But the real problem isn’t the rounding. It’s the selectivity. Netanyahu’s multiplier is designed to work in one direction only. It enlarges Israeli dead into an American catastrophe so that American audiences will feel what Israelis felt. Applied to Palestinians, it produces numbers so large they would make any American audience ask what, exactly, it has been paying for. That is why he never applies it to them.

What the comparison actually shows

The point of a per-capita comparison is to help outsiders grasp the scale of a loss. Netanyahu wants Americans to imagine 40,000 of their countrymen murdered in a day, and to understand everything Israel has done since as the natural response. Very well. Ask Americans to imagine 11.6 million of their countrymen dead, in a territory sealed off from escape, and to call it self-defense.

No American president would describe 11.6 million American dead as a proportionate response to anything. No American would accept that the dead deserved it because some of them were armed. And no one who has run the numbers can accept the premise of Netanyahu’s arithmetic, which is that Israeli lives scale up and Palestinian lives do not.

The method is Netanyahu’s. So is the answer it produces: by his own measure, the catastrophe in Gaza is about 290 times larger than the one he asks the world to remember.

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Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison Suggests Trump Will Try to Steal Midterms, Tells Leftists to be Ready to ‘Take the Streets’

Keith Ellison recently appeared with far left podcaster Dean Obeidallah and suggested that Trump and Republicans will try to ‘steal’ the 2026 midterm elections. He then talks about how the left has to be ready to ‘take the streets’ if this happens.

This is not some random, left wing activist saying this. He is the attorney general of the state of Minnesota.

Consider this a warning and a preview. If Democrats completely bomb in the midterms – and they very well could – people on the left are going to lose their minds and we will be likely to see rioting in certain locations.

Partial transcript by the Western Lensman:

Keith Ellison says Republicans mean to cheat in the midterms, and people should be “ready to protest, take to the streets.”

“Don’t act like, oh, they couldn’t mean that. They mean it…So be ready to get your dukes up.”

“I’m one who believes in peaceful protest, First Amendment.”

“But if they try to take our vote away, we should absolutely be in the street. And I’ll be right out there with everybody else.”

So the sitting Minnesota AG is casting doubts on the legitimacy of the election before a vote is counted and warning about firing up street mobilization in response.

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