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.

11 arrested in France for beating death of far-right student

 French police investigating the beating of a far-right militant who died of brain injuries have arrested 11 people, prosecutors said Wednesday, in a case adding fuel to long-standing divides in French politics ahead of presidential elections in 2027.

Quentin Deranque, a 23-year-old student described as a fervent nationalist, died in a hospital on Saturday.

He was beaten two days earlier by a group of people in the city of Lyon, in fighting that erupted between far-left and far-right supporters on the margins of a student meeting where a far-left lawmaker, Rima Hassan, was a keynote speaker.

An autopsy found that Deranque suffered a fractured skull and fatal brain injuries, according to Lyon’s prosecutor, Thierry Dran.

He launched the police investigation for homicide and other potential criminal charges.

Dran’s office said police detained a man and a woman on Wednesday morning, with nine other people taken into custody on Tuesday night.

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Senators Talk Digital Freedom for Iran While Expanding Surveillance at Home

Three US senators want federal funding to help Iranians bypass censorship and access VPNs. The same three senators have spent years supporting the surveillance systems that track Americans online.

We obtained a copy of their letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio for you here.

Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), James Lankford (R-OK), and Jacky Rosen (D-NV) are backing funding for anti-censorship technology and virtual private networks abroad.

Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), whose privacy record is largely clean, is also supporting the effort. The bipartisan coalition wants to help people circumvent government internet controls. Just not the American government’s internet controls.

Graham’s voting record reads like a blueprint for the surveillance state he claims to oppose overseas. He voted for the Patriot Act in 2001 and has supported every major expansion since. When Section 702 of FISA came up for reauthorization, Graham backed it. When Congress considered making Section 702 permanent in 2017 with no sunset clauses and no congressional review, Graham backed that too.

His encryption stance is just as consistent. Graham co-sponsored the EARN IT Act in 2020, which would pressure platforms to weaken encryption to avoid liability.

He also backed the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data (LAED) Act, a bill that would require companies to build backdoors into their security systems. VPNs work because of encryption. Graham has spent years trying to break it.

He’s also pushed to repeal Section 230 protections and supported requiring government licenses for companies offering AI tools. When surveillance mechanisms he championed caught his own communications, Graham complained. Privacy for senators. Mass surveillance for everyone else.

Lankford introduced the Free Speech Fairness Act, which removed restrictions on political speech by religious and nonprofit organizations. That same senator has backed the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which will likely require platforms to implement age verification and give regulators the power to pressure companies into removing content.

He called for Section 230 to be “ripped up” and backed a national strategy against antisemitism that includes government coordination on speech. When Edward Snowden revealed the scope of NSA surveillance, Lankford branded him a traitor for telling the public what their government was doing.

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Distraught family blasts Canada for euthanizing son, 26, who suffered from ‘seasonal depression’

A family has accused Canada‘s laws of ‘killing the disabled and vulnerable’ months after their son, who suffered from seasonal depression, died by assisted suicide. 

Kiano Vafaeian, a 26-year-old blind man with Type 1 diabetes, died in December using Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program, which allows patients with ‘grievous and irremediable’ medical conditions to request a lethal drug. 

Eligibility was expanded in 2021 to include people with chronic illnesses, disabilities and, pending parliamentary review, potentially individuals with certain mental health conditions.

Vafaeian faced mental health struggles stemming from a car accident at 17, and according to his mother, his depression often flared during the winter months.

For years, the family had successfully prevented their son from using the program. Last year, however, Dr Ellen Wiebe, a MAID provider in British Columbia, approved Vafaeian’s death – news the family only learned about days later. 

Vafaeian’s mother, Margaret Marsilla of Ontario, alleged that Wiebe was ‘coaching’ her son on how to qualify as a Track 2 patient – those whose natural deaths aren’t deemed ‘reasonably imminent,’ according to Fox News Digital.

‘We believe that she was coaching him on how to deteriorate his body and what she can possibly approve him for and what she can get away with approving him for,’ Marsilla told the outlet.

Marsilla has since been battling fiercely to undo the Track 2 modification and to support Bill C-218, a legislative effort intended to restrict MAID for those whose only condition is a mental illness. 

‘We don’t want to see any other family member suffer, or any country introduce a piece of legislation that kills their disabled or vulnerable without appropriate proper treatment plans that could save their lives,’ Marsilla told Fox.

At 17, a severe car accident derailed Vafaeian’s college plans, and he spent years moving between family members’ homes, his mother said. 

It all came to a head in 2022: after losing vision in one eye, he became ‘obsessed’ with the assisted-suicide program. 

‘He kept on emphasizing about how he could get approved,’ Marsilla told the outlet. 

‘We never thought there would be a chance that any doctor would approve a 22- or 23-year-old at that time for MAID because of diabetes or blindness.’

That year, Vafaeian attempted to die under the program for the first time after being approved, even going so far as to schedule a time, date and location for the procedure in Toronto. 

But the plan unraveled when his mother accidentally discovered the appointment email and called the doctor, posing as a woman inquiring about MAID. She also took to social media to publicly voice her opposition. 

She taped the conversation with the doctor and sent it to a reporter. The doctor then postponed the procedure over the outcry and decided not to go through with it. 

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‘Absolute surprise’: Homo erectus skulls found in China are almost 1.8 million years old — the oldest evidence of the ancient human relatives in East Asia

Three Homo erectus skulls previously unearthed in China are almost 1.8 million years old, around 600,000 years older than originally thought, a new study finds.

This revelation has made the Yunxian skulls from Hubei province the oldest evidence of our early human relatives, known as hominins, in East Asia, according to research published Wednesday (Feb. 18) in the journal Science Advances.

Study co-author Christopher Bae, a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told Live Science in an email that he felt “absolute surprise” when he first saw the results of the analysis. This more ancient age may force experts to rethink the date that H. erectus first emerged, which is believed to have occurred around 2 million years ago in Africa.

“What this means is that we need to consider pushing the origin of Homo erectus back” to around 2.6 million years ago, Bae said in an email.

H. erectus has long been considered the first human relative to leave Africa, with 1.78 million to 1.85 million-year-old fossils found at the Dmanisi site in Georgia being the earliest evidence of humans in Asia. But stone tools discovered at two sites in China dated to 2.1 million and 2.43 million years ago have complicated that picture, since they predate experts’ theory of when H. erectus originated.

The exact date of the three Yunxian skulls, which were found between 1989 and 2022, has long been debated, but they were previously considered to be around 1 million years old based on the age of animal teeth found close by, although one study dated them to around 1.1 million years ago using electron spin resonance and uranium-series dating. So when the opportunity arose to try a new dating technique at the site, Bae and his colleagues thought it was a good chance to revisit the debate.

Their team used a technique called cosmogenic nuclide burial dating to determine the age of the quartz found in the sediment layers where the skulls were found. This dating technique measures the half-life of two chemical variants — Aluminum-26 and Beryllium-10 — to determine how much time has passed since the quartz was exposed to cosmic rays.

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Was It a Coincidental Traffic Stop or AI-Powered Surveillance?

Seth Ferranti was driving his Ford pickup on a southeastern Nebraska stretch of the interstate in November 2024 when law enforcement pulled him over, claiming that he had wobbled onto the hard shoulder.

As the Seward County sheriff’s deputies questioned Ferranti, a filmmaker who had spent 21 years in prison for distributing LSD, they allegedly smelled cannabis. Declaring this probable cause for a search, they searched the vehicle and discovered more than 400 pounds of marijuana.

But were those the actual reasons for the stop and search? When Ferranti went on trial, his attorneys presented a license plate reader report produced by the security communications company Motorola Solutions. It revealed Ferranti had been consistently monitored prior to his arrest, including by the local sheriff on the day he was apprehended. (Neither the sheriff’s office nor Motorola responded to Reason‘s requests for comment.)

Ferranti’s legal team argued that it was unconstitutional to surveil somebody based on his previous crimes. The argument did not carry the day: Last month their client was sentenced to up to two and a half years for possession of cannabis with intent to distribute. But the case still raises substantial moral and constitutional questions about both the scale of these public-private surveillance partnerships and the ways they’re being used.

Ferranti had long been a celebrity in the drug-reform world, going back to that LSD arrest in the early ’90s. After that first bust, he jumped bail, went on the lam, landed on the U.S. Marshals’ 15 Most Wanted Fugitives list, and even staged his own drowning to evade the authorities. After he started serving his sentence in 1993, he became a prolific prison journalist, writing the “I’m Busted” column for Vice. The New Jersey native always insisted that his crimes were nonviolent and that the drugs he sold, LSD and cannabis, had medicinal or therapeutic benefits.

After Ferranti came out of prison, his 2017 documentary White Boy—the true story of a teenage FBI informant who became a major cocaine trafficker—was a success on Netflix. He produced a number of further films, including 2023’s Secret History of the LSD Trade. And apparently, the government kept watching him.

It’s been watching a lot of people—and Motorola isn’t the only company helping it. Flock Safety was founded in 2017, and within five years it had tens of thousands of cameras operational. As the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has warned, Flock’s AI-assisted automated license plate recognition (ALPR) system has been undergoing an “insidious expansion” beyond its supposed purposes of identifying vehicles of interest, such as stolen cars and hit-and-run suspects. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has used it to locate illegal migrants, and law enforcement in Texas used it to investigate a self-administered abortion, foreshadowing its potential use as a predictive policing tool for all Americans. Lee Schmidt, a veteran in Virginia, recently learned that the system logged him more than 500 times in four months. 

“I don’t know whether law enforcement officers are using [ALPRs] to do predictive policing,” says Joshua Windham of the Institute of Justice, a public interest law firm that is campaigning to stop the warrantless use of license plate reader cameras. “We know that [Customs and Border Patrol] is using ALPRs generally to stop cars with what they deem ‘suspicious’ travel patterns.”

After reviewing the document cataloguing the Ferranti’s vehicle monitoring, Windham adds: “The records are consistent with an officer either looking up a car in his system to see where else that car was captured by ALPRs, or that car showing up as a ‘hot list’ alert in the Motorola system. But it’s hard to tell, from the records alone, whether the stop was a ‘predictive policing’ stop.”

Ferranti is convinced it was. “There were no warrants, investigations, informants, state police, DEA, or FBI involvement, just Seward County Sheriff’s office [and an] AI-assisted license plate tracking service to perpetuate their outdated War on Drugs mission,” he said in an Instagram post published by his family following his sentencing. “Traveling the highways as a person with a record is now considered [suspicious] activity by the AI.”

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Arizona Senators Take Up Bills To Criminalize ‘Excessive’ Marijuana Smoke, Even On Private Property

Arizona lawmakers are considering at a pair of measures that would make the act of creating “excessive” amounts of marijuana smoke a nuisance crime punishable by jail time, even if the person is using cannabis in compliance with state law in their own homes.

Sen. J.D. Mesnard (R) is sponsoring the two proposals—one that would amend state statute legislatively that would put the issue before voters at the ballot. Members of the Senate Judiciary and Elections Committee are set to consider the proposals this week.

The lawmaker said he decided to push the issue due to the smell of marijuana in his own neighborhood.

Both versions of Mesnard’s legislation stipulate that “it is presumed that a person who creates excessive marijuana smoke and odor causes a condition that endangers the safety or health of others.”

The reason behind having both a proposed bill and resolution is related to the potential legal challenges of lawmakers changing the voter-approved marijuana legalization law.

The legislation would establish “a presumption that the creation of excessive marijuana smoke and odor is injurious to health, indecent, offensive to the senses and an obstruction to the free use of property that interferes with the comfortable enjoyment of life or property,” a summary of the proposal says.

If enacted, the loosely defined offense of creating “excessive” marijuana smoke under the bill and resolution would be considered a class 3 misdemeanor, punishable by up to 30 days in jail, a maximum $500 fine and up to one year of probation.

“I’m hearing from some people that, depending on their neighbor situation, they may not be able to have their kids go outside because the marijuana smoke is so potent,” Mesnard, the sponsor, said. “It can even creep into your own house or, in my case, into my garage.”

“But experiencing now what’s happened, even in my own neighborhood, is a pretty frustrating situation,” he told The Arizona Daily Star. “You should be responsible neighbors if you’re going to smoke pot… It can be a real issue for families, especially with kids.”

Asked about the seeming double standard given that no such nuisance offenses exist for smoking cigarettes or cigars on a private property, the senator said, “I’ll concede I hadn’t thought about it.”

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Kurt Cobain’s death declared a homicide by Seattle cop ordered to probe investigation: ‘Botched’

Kurt Cobain was found lifeless in a greenhouse attached to his Seattle home, and within a few hours, investigators declared his death a suicide. 

Now, a retired Seattle Police captain has claimed that the physical evidence from the Nirvana frontman’s death scene ‘does not add up,’ alleging the case was mishandled and staged to look like he took his own life.

Neil Low, who spent 50 years with the Seattle Police Department (SPD) and was asked by his chief to audit the Cobain case in 2005, told the Daily Mail he believes investigators failed to treat the rockstar’s death as a potential homicide properly. 

‘I just am not buying that Kurt did that to himself,’ Low said, describing the SPD investigation as ‘botched.’ However, Low did not work on the initial investigation and it was not conducted at his assigned precinct. 

He cited what he described as anomalies in blood evidence, the violence of the shotgun wound and alleged inconsistencies at the scene. 

Low, who retired in 2018, discussed inconsistencies within the autopsy and SPD reports, including missing notes, omitted witness observations and conflicting details about events leading up to Cobain’s death. 

‘One thing about report writing is the human error factor: misheard, misunderstood, transposed thoughts, and forgotten details,’ said Low. 

‘They were led astray. I might have fallen for it, too, but now I think it’s a homicide, and I do think the case should be reopened.’

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Power Panic: Clinton’s Trump Tirade Reveals a Fading Clique

When Hillary Clinton — a former U.S. Secretary of State — reduced a high-stakes geopolitical debate in Munich to teenage-level sniping — “I don’t like him” about Donald Trump — it wasn’t just embarrassing. It was revealing.

What unfolded was not diplomatic gravitas. It was political resentment exported across the Atlantic. A former chief diplomat of the United States venting personal dislike on a European stage — that alone speaks volumes about the tone the event has sunk to.

Substance vs. Sputtering

Czech Deputy PM Petr Macinka stuck to arguments. Focused on policy. He made the case that America’s political earthquake was not an accident but a reaction — to ideological overreach, cultural radicalism, and elite detachment.

Clinton responded not with counterarguments, but with disdain.

Backing her was Radosław Sikorski — himself a former Polish Defense Minister — who chimed in with pointed interjections that escalated the combative tone. Two former high-ranking officials, once responsible for diplomacy and defense, now reduced to political sniping at a supposedly strategic forum.

The applause that followed was telling. Less a celebration of debate — more a reflection of a like-minded audience.

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New Mexico Lawmakers FINALLY Launch Probe Into Epstein’s Zorro Ranch Amid GRUESOME Burial Claims

New revelations have the potential to expose the depths of Jeffrey Epstein’s depravity at his remote New Mexico ranch, where fresh claims suggest victims may have been killed and buried on the grounds.

The investigation kicked off after explosive allegations surfaced in an email claiming two foreign girls were strangled during “rough, fetish s*x” and buried in the hills outside Epstein’s Zorro Ranch on orders from Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, referred to as “Madam G” in the correspondance.

New Mexico Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard, horrified by the potential involvement of state land in these atrocities, pushed for the probe. “I’m horrified when I learned something new, especially when I learned that state land could have been used, could have been involved in some of these monstrous activities,” she said.

The bipartisan “truth commission” established by New Mexico’s House of Representatives will scrutinize past activities at the 7,600-acre property, including whether local authorities turned a blind eye while Epstein operated his trafficking ring.

Epstein bought the ranch in 1993 from former Democratic Gov. Bruce King, transforming it into a sprawling compound complete with a 26,700-square-foot mansion, private airstrip, and helipad—perfect for flying in victims undetected.

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