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.

Massive Smoke Plume As Tanker Erupts In Flames, Spills Oil Off Russia’s Sochi Coast

The Black Sea tanker wars have continued Tuesday. In the latest tit-for-tat episode, a large so-called ‘shadow fleet’ tanker is ablaze close to the Russian Black Sea port of Sochi.

The vessel, identified in reports as likely being the Aframax Rio, which was previously sanctioned by Ukraine for alleged involvement in Russian oil exports, is producing a massive smoke plume and has been photographed and filmed by shocked onlookers at Sochi’s shores. Images like the below are widely circulating on Russian Telegram channels.

Russian regional authorities in nearby Sirius have since confirmed in a public announcement that a tanker had caught fire in the Black Sea.

Reuters writes that “The beaches in the settlement in Russia’s south Krasnodar region are closed to the public, the authorities said, without giving any details of the cause of the fire.”

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James Talarico’s Campaign Goes MIA. What’s Going On?

Texas State Rep. James Talarico (D-50th District) has disappeared from the campaign trail with 28 days left before he faces Republican Ken Paxton. His campaign calendar now lists no public appearances for the candidate himself, only canvassing and get-out-the-vote gatherings.

According to a report from our sister site Townhall, Talarico’s last public sighting in Texas came on Saturday, Sept. 26, more than a week ago. He then left for a fundraising trip to New York City, where the VIP dinner ran $27,000 a plate. The guest list included a filmmaker who called America a “s***hole” and a group that advocates child sex change surgeries.

The absences piled up from there. Talarico skipped his in-person Sept. 30 speech to the U.S. Hispanic Business Council in the Rio Grande Valley and joined virtually from a hotel instead. The explanation attendees got was, “His staff says he’s ill and was unable to travel.” During that remote appearance, Talarico said he had to seek treatment at an urgent care clinic in Dallas, and social media users have disputed that timeline.

Then came the recycled footage. On Friday, Oct. 2, the campaign posted video from a Feb. 22 rally, held before Talarico had even won the Democrat nomination, and tried to pass it off as current.

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Democrat Congressional Candidate Accused In Sworn Police Statement Of Dumping Waste In Waterway, Polluting District And State

Democrat Blake Gendebien wants to go to Washington and lecture New Yorkers about protecting the environment.

According to a sworn statement filed with the New York State Police, he can’t even keep his own backyard from turning into a landfill, and the garbage is spilling toward a waterway where North Country families swim, fish, and draw their water.

On Monday, Gendebien’s opponent, Republican congressional candidate Anthony Constantino, held a press conference to reveal the findings of a private investigation into Gendebien’s farm, and demanded the appropriate authorities launch their own investigation immediately.

The investigation produced a supporting deposition, filed with the State Police on October 1 by investigator Nathan Couture of Brooks Investigations, that relays the account of a confidential witness who worked on Gendebien’s farm.

According to the sworn statement, Gendebien directed his own workers to haul garbage into a wooded creek area behind his property, which feeds the St. Lawrence River.

According to testimony, this was routine, and it was done for one reason: to dodge waste disposal fees. Gendebien kept the money, and Upstate New York got his trash.

In late July, investigators flew a drone over the woods and the creek. The images show a dumpsite nearly the size of two basketball courts, choked with garbage, with debris thrown straight into the water. This isn’t a stray bag blown off a truck. It’s an operation.

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OpenAI Shops $30 Billion Round To UAE Funds, BlackRock As Altman’s ‘Bad Things’ Remark Draws Bipartisan Fire

With its planned IPO on ice for the moment, OpenAI is pitching a $30 billion funding round to a group of United Arab Emirates sovereign funds led by Abu Dhabi’s MGX, along with BlackRock, at a $1.4 trillion pre-money valuation, Bloomberg reported Monday. There is no lead investor, and the price was set by OpenAI rather than negotiated. Meanwhile CEO Sam Altman has sparked a firestorm in DC with comments that the world should accept “some bad things happening” for the benefits of AI.

The OpenAI round

The UAE funds are considering an investment up to $10 billion between them at that $1.4 trillion valuation – which is is 64% above the $852 billion post-money valuation of the $122 billion round in March. The figure would also place OpenAI’s valuation above Anthropic, which was at $965 billion in May.

OpenAI’s annualized revenue has reportedly passed $40 billion, up 70% since July. That makes the ask roughly 35x run-rate for a company that Fortune says booked $6.7 billion of revenue and an operating loss in Q2, and that the FT reported spent $34 billion last year. One FT source said OpenAI “needs capital.” OpenAI says the March round left it with plenty. OpenAI filed confidentially for an IPO on June 8. Then, on Sept. 12, Altman told Fortune it wouldn’t be 2026 – “an ill-advised moment to go public,” given what’s going on with safety (and then just recently said ‘screw it’ – AI is worth the danger). That said, in April the WSJ reported that OpenAI had missed revenue and user targets and that CFO Sarah Friar was worried the company might not be able to pay for future compute contracts if revenue failed to catch up.

Then there’s the backstop. As we reported last November, Friar suggested the federal government could “backstop” OpenAI’s data-center financing. In June, as we detailed, Altman began floating a plan to hand small OpenAI equity stakes to ordinary Americans, which we read as a backdoor backstop. We asked at the time whether the bailout would come before the IPO or after. Nobody mentioned the third option: a $30 billion bridge round, priced by the issuer, in between.

DeepSeek

Overnight, Bloomberg also reported that DeepSeek is close to locking in at least 80 billion yuan ($12 billion) of new funding, with signed term sheets that could take the total to 100 billion yuan – twice the 50 billion it originally set out to raise. Tencent and CATL are writing the biggest checks. This is the same round DeepSeek paused in late July, as we noted, after transcripts leaked of founder Liang Wenfeng saying that Huawei was giving DeepSeek about 16,000 Ascend 950s while the internet giants got hundreds of thousands, and that DeepSeek could get hold of some processors he called “noncompliant.” The round restarted in August at a valuation of about $74 billion and has now blown through its target. On annualized revenue reported at $400-500 million in July, that valuation is well over 100x sales. OpenAI at 35x looks cheap next to it.

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France Street Violence Hits Record Levels Amid Multicultural Youth Revolts

The French Ministry of the Interior states that street violence has reached record levels fuelled in part by the violent student uprisings seen in multicultural hubs across the country in recent weeks.

Following another day of mass mobilisation of students in concert with far-left political parties and radical trade unions apparently intent on sparking more chaos, the Ministry of the Interior released statistics showing an unprecedented level of violence in public spaces.

According to government data, public violence incidents outside the home hit a record high of 20,000 per month in September, or nearly 700 per day, Le Figaro reported.

This represented a seven per cent increase over August, suggesting a significant role for the youth riots that began in the middle of last month and have featured high levels of violent attacks on police, other students, teachers and school administrators, and other innocent bystanders.

Prominent French criminologist Professor Alain Bauer lamented that society is becoming “TikTok-ized”, in which “nothing ever has consequences anymore”, and young people are increasingly becoming “uninhibited, sometimes nihilistic”.

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FBI Arrests Washington “Trans Woman” Accused of Helping Plot the Canadian School Shooting — Sent Cash, Tactical Advice, and Watched the Livestream as Children Were Shot

The FBI arrested a 30-year-old Bellingham, Washington resident on Tuesday and charged him with conspiracy to murder persons in a foreign country for allegedly coaching, funding, and agreeing to broadcast the February 10 slaughter at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia, the attack that left 8 people dead, including 5 children.

James Cody Bryant was taken into custody in Bellingham and appeared in federal court in Seattle.

The charge carries a maximum sentence of life in federal prison.

According to the Department of Justice announcement and the accompanying 41-page FBI criminal complaint, Bryant allegedly maintained extensive communications with 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar during the six months before the February 10 massacre.

Both Bryant and Van Rootselaar were born male and identified as transgender women, according to police and federal officials.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said in February that Van Rootselaar was “born a biological male” who began identifying as female about six years earlier.

On Tuesday, U.S. officials said they understood Bryant was also born male and identified as female.

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Supreme Court Rejects Radical Far-Left PA Judge’s Appeal After He Was Suspended For Hyper-Partisan Pro-Biden Facebook Posts

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear former Philadelphia Judge Mark B. Cohen’s last-ditch bid to undo his suspension for turning a public Facebook page, one that identified him as a sitting judge and showed him in his robes, into a Democrat cheering section for Joe Biden, Josh Shapiro, and the party line.

The justices denied certiorari without comment. Cohen, a Democrat who spent more than four decades in the Pennsylvania House before winning a Court of Common Pleas seat in 2018, had asked the high court to rule that the First Amendment shielded dozens of partisan posts he made while on the bench. It did not.

As The Hill reported, Pennsylvania’s judicial discipline system suspended him in 2024 over posts praising Democrats, including Biden and Gov. Josh Shapiro, and pushing policies such as raising the minimum wage.

That suspension was not a close call, and it was not a surprise.

The Judicial Conduct Board charged Cohen over scores of posts on a page that advertised his status as a Family Division judge.

The record, laid out in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s January 21, 2026, opinion and in the board’s filings, shows a longtime Democratic operative who never really left the campaign.

He called Biden an excellent president. He boosted Shapiro. He backed Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner.

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NATO state preparing to strike St. Petersburg

Estonia is preparing to deploy weapons capable of striking the Russian city of St. Petersburg, the Financial Times has reported.

Amid unprecedented mis- and dis-information from NATO’s European members, Tallinn has presented the proposed buildup as a form of deterrence, should Moscow “test” NATO. However, Russia’s leadership has repeatedly stressed that it has no intention of attacking the US-led military bloc. Moscow has also warned that any direct conflict with NATO would likely escalate into nuclear war.

The British newspaper reported on Monday that Estonia is deploying additional troops along the Russian border and acquiring tactical missile systems capable of reaching St. Petersburg. They include US-made HIMARS and South Korean Chunmoo launchers, both of which can fire longer-range projectiles.

Estonia also trained with the UK during this year’s Spring Storm exercise using Nyan kamikaze jet drones, which can likewise reach Russia’s second-largest city from Estonian territory, according to the report.

The Baltic state has a standing army of just 4,200 troops, but plans to reinforce it with tens of thousands of reservists if tensions with Russia escalate.

Last month, Defense Minister Martin Herem said during a public lecture that Tallinn could not afford to keep mobilized troops in the field for long.

“I have jokingly said that if we get to the orange zone there and carry out mobilization, but Russia does not attack, then it would be economically more correct to attack ourselves,” he said. “Then at least we will know when it will start, and we will not waste food and air in vain”

Russian President Vladimir Putin responded to the remark with an idiom: “The circus has left, but the clowns remain.” He added that Moscow has no plans to attack Estonia or any other NATO member.

Commenting on the FT report, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova echoed the president, saying it belongs in the funny pages.

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Video Shows Abdul El-Sayed Stating He Has ‘Dual Citizenship’ in Egypt and US

Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed told a Detroit audience in 2016 that he has “dual citizenship” in the United States and Egypt, according to a previously unreported video obtained by our Chuck Ross. It’s the second time that we know of that El-Sayed has made the claim, one that his campaign now says is not true.

“I carry dual citizenship, and I grew up spending most of my summers in another country where I understood what it meant not to have the right to self-govern,” El-Sayed, whose parents emigrated from Egypt to the Detroit area in 1978, said at a GlobeMed conference that took place while he served as the city’s health director. He went on to say he was questioned by Egyptian police during one of those summer visits for publicly cursing Egypt’s president at the time, a story he still tells on the campaign trail a decade later.

“The newly revealed 2016 video marks at least the second time El-Sayed has publicly claimed to have Egyptian status,” Ross writes. “His academic résumé stated in 2014 that he was a citizen of the United States and Egypt, the Free Beacon previously reported.” El-Sayed’s campaign told us at the time that he was mistaken about his citizenship status, which he “tried to verify … later on in life” but was “unable to find any documentation.”

“El-Sayed has expressed mixed feelings about his ancestral homeland. He has criticized secular Egyptian presidents like Mubarak and Abdel el-Sisi, while praising its Islamist leaders. In 2012, he signed an open letter alongside ‘leaders of the Egyptian community’ that urged the repressive Muslim Brotherhood and then-president Mohamed Morsi to ‘purge the media and police’ in order to solidify the Islamist group’s power. El-Sayed has referred to Bassem Youssef, an antisemitic pundit who claims Israel was behind 9/11, as a ‘fellow Egyptian.’ ‘He’s hilarious,’ El-Sayed said of Youssef.”

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