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.

‘Lindsey Liked War’: Trump Laughs Off Graham’s Giddiness Over Iran Onslaught

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday recalled Lindsey Graham’s warmongering ways ahead of the late Republican senator’s funeral, while once again threatening to commit more atrocities in Iran if an agreement to stop the war he and Israel started there is not reached soon.

Trump phoned in to Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” morning show to laud his “great friendship” with the senator from South Carolina, who died on July 11 at the age of 71. Previously unreleased video published over the weekend shows Graham jubilant over Trump’s decision to attack Iran in February and saying the president “loves blowing stuff up.”

The president told “Fox and Friends” hosts: “He was very much a hawk, as you would say, on Iran. Lindsey liked war, to be honest with you.”

“I said, you’re a nice guy, how can you like war so much?” the president added. “He was a guy that liked war. I jokingly say – and there’s nothing funny about it – but he’s never seen a war that he didn’t like.”

Graham had pushed for attacking Iran since at least 2010, both for strategic and financial reasons; in March, he boasted that the United States was “gonna make a ton of money” from the war.

While Graham isn’t the only Republican in Congress to make inflammatory comments about Iran – just over the weekend, Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana opined that “sometimes you have to kill a few chickens to scare the monkeys” – he was the most consistent cheerleader for continuing attacks on the Mideast nation.

Trump also discussed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, DC to attend Graham’s funeral and make the case for continued war on Iran. Netanyahu is Trump’s partner in the illegal war of choice, and is additionally wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Graham was accused of incitement to genocide for advocating the total destruction of Gaza.

Moving on during Tuesday’s interview, Trump said that if the Iranian government does not agree to a deal to end the 150-day war, “then I go back and I finish the job.”

Trump and Netanyahu have both been accused of sabotaging negotiations with Iran when agreements seemed nearly at hand.

The president again said he would destroy Iranian bridges and power plants if a deal is not reached soon, his latest in a string of war crime threats that has included an earlier genocidal vow to wipe out the “whole civilization” of Iran.

“I could take out most of their bridges in less than an hour,” Trump claimed on Tuesday. “I could knock out the power plants within one day.”

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The War’s Back is Broken

Trump ordered the US military not to carry out new strikes on Iran Friday night, despite approving earlier a “Gates of Hell massive attack” on Iran.

The US has now requested a new temporary ceasefire with Iran and is seeking a return to the collapsed and suspended MoU, with discussions to include Yemen, and with Trump seeking to make AnsarAllah a party to the negotiations.

Clearly Trump is angry, and fears that that the war is consuming his Presidency (and his legacy). Iran comprehensively rejected all negotiations throughout this last week and confirmed it will not start negotiations under any circumstances. Put simply, why would Iran consent to give the US time to regroup and rearm before launching another round of strikes on Iran when it has the US “on the run.”

A return to the MoU whose credibility Trump repeatedly has shredded? Unlikely.

Will Schryver notes that rumours are swirling that the Pentagon is pressuring Trump to call off the war with Iran because the US has nearly exhausted its stockpiles of air-defence interceptors and stand-off strike missiles. The President’s top aides are also uneasy about the prospect of a widening war in the Middle East, the alienation of key Gulf allies vulnerable to further Iranian attack, and the coming energy crunch. “Few if any in Mr. Trump’s inner circle believed the plan to escalate was wise, said the two people briefed,” the New York Times reports.

It seems too that jiggery-pokery over the exact fuel supply situation in the US may have played a part in Trump’s backtrack. Larry Johnson reports that –

A] brief prepared by Karl Miller investigates how the US military’s covert fuel procurement and export operations are depleting the nation’s diesel and jet fuel reserves, particularly during a period when domestic stocks are already critically low.

In gist, Miller says that –

much of this (covert) fuel export is routed through opaque channels, such as the Rotterdam trans-shipment hub, where the final military or foreign allocation is not publicly reconciled, leaving the American economy exposed to shortage risks – whilst military and foreign operations – ‘notably Israel’ – receive priority access.

This report by Miller seems to connect to the US authorities’ open manipulation of oil benchmarks designed to convince markets that there is no danger of fuel shortages arising from the ongoing emergency release from the SPR (Strategic Petroleum Reserves) of 172 million barrels that was initiated to counter supply shocks from the conflict with Iran.

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Israel’s Ghoulish Settlers Eye Up Gaza, As Netanyahu Kills Trump’s Board of Peace

On Sunday evening (July 19), a group of some of the most repulsive, ghoulish people on the face of the earth marched towards the perimeter fence separating the Gaza Strip from the rest of the world to declare their intention to re-colonize Gaza, to re-establish three Israeli settlements that were dismantled in 2005 when, under Ariel Sharon, 21 settlements in total were abandoned, occupied, at the time, by 8,000 Israeli settlers.

These fanatical Israeli settlers, on what was billed as the “March of Thousands”, although only a few hundred people attended, were led by the two far-right ministers in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government — Itamar Ben Gvir, the Minister for National Security, who is in charge of Israel’s prisons, which, for Palestinians, have become a gulag of torture facilities since October 7, 2023, and Bezalel Smotrich, the Minister of Finance, and also the minister in charge of settlement affairs within the Defense Ministry, who has played a huge role in the ever-growing, and ever more violent expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank.

Speaking at the rally, Ben Gvir said, “If someone had said three years ago that we would control 70% of the Gaza Strip, no one would have believed it. So today I say: there will be Jewish settlement throughout Gaza. We are returning home. Gaza is ours.”

Smotrich, meanwhile, warned that a change of government in the forthcoming elections in October, could “roll back all the Zionist and national settlement revolution” undertaken over the last four years.

The two men were accompanied by more than two dozen ministers and legislators, as well as the 80-year old settler fanatic Daniella Weiss, who told the crowd, “They ask me, ‘What will happen to the Arabs in Gaza?’ There will be no Arabs in Gaza, unequivocally.”

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RFK Jr. Reveals the COVID Vaccine Secret That Fauci Hid From Americans

For years, Dr. Anthony Fauci assured Americans that the COVID-19 vaccines were safe and effective. What he never mentioned, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is that he may have suffered one of those “rare” adverse events himself, and he hid it from the country while publicly insisting such injuries weren’t happening.

Kennedy appeared on Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle to discuss the newly released diary entries that Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) made public, entries that document Fauci’s day-to-day life during the pandemic, on top of his disturbing obsession with himself and the power he wielded during the pandemic. When Laura Ingraham asked whether there would be any accountability for the trillions of dollars lost, the ruined education of America’s children, and the shattered reputation of the public health establishment, Kennedy didn’t hesitate.

“Yeah, and millions of people injured,” Kennedy said. “So he lied about masks, he lied about social distancing, he lied about the transmission, he lied about natural immunity, he lied about the capacity, as you just said, of the vaccine to prevent infection.”

Then came the bombshell.

“He got vaccinated at a very, very public press conference in January of 2021,” Kennedy said, noting that five months later, the diary reveals, Fauci “had a pulmonary infarction, which is one of the adverse events that NIH, CDC and FDA said are expected from the vaccine.”

“He never told anybody,” Kennedy said. “He got treated for it privately by the best doctors in America at the same time, he was telling everybody that was not an adverse event.”

Think about that for a second. The man who badgered every American into taking the shot, insisting it was perfectly safe, appears to have experienced one of the exact injuries his own agencies flagged, then quietly got elite private care while assuring the public that such reactions weren’t real. Ordinary Americans who reported similar problems got dismissed and mocked. Fauci got the best doctors in America.

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Mamdani Election Bombshell: More Fraudulent Votes Cast Than Margin of Mamdani’s ‘Victory,’ Says Election Auditor

A prominent election-integrity activist has uncovered bombshell evidence suggesting that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 election victory may not have been legitimate.

Marly Hornik, the founder of RealAmerica.Vote and NY Citizens Audit, has suggested that the 2025 election included large numbers of unqualified or nonexistent voters. But that’s only part of the problem.

“I actually don’t know whether Mamdani won the mayoral race, and I’m not here to say that he didn’t,” Hornik said during a July 22 interview on New York radio station WABC’s “Sid & Friends in the Morning” program.

“The problem we uncovered is that the New York City and the New York State Boards of Elections have no idea if Mamdani won the mayoral election either. And that’s where the rubber meets the road here.”

After examining 1 million of the total 2.2 million voters who participated in the election, her organization discovered that 7  percent were nonexistent in records, 6 percent had fake Social Security numbers, and 10 percent didn’t even live in NYC.

In total, they identified 230,000 illegal votes, which exceeded Mamdani’s 207,000 vote margin of victory over former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent.

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Minority Report: FBI Seeks AI for Political Watch List

The FBI office in charge of maintaining the terrorist watch list is seeking an artificial intelligence system for pre-crime policing, according to procurement documents obtained by Reason. The request for information for vendors, posted by the FBI’s procurement division in March, solicits potential bidders for a project that would supercharge the Threat Screening Center (TSC) with new predictive AI capabilities—just as its focus moves from Islamist terrorism to domestic dissent.

“The solution must leverage existing enterprise datasets that include enriched or enhanced data elements with documented source attribution to develop predictive models. When new data is ingested, the system must analyze similarity, pattern alignment, and attribute correlation against existing records to predict where additional relevant information may be derived across federated systems,” the document reads, listing “Predictive Modeling Using Enhanced Data with Traceable Lineage” as one of six requirements. In other words, the TSC wants to use AI to help predict who might be a terrorist.

The FBI declined Reason‘s request for comment.

The TSC, originally called the Terrorist Screening Center, was founded in 2003. President George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Presidential Directive-6 ordered the FBI to combine all existing government terrorist watch lists into one center with a 24/7 staff on call to respond to queries from other law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Most of the hundreds of thousands of names on the TSC watch list are foreign citizens believed to be tied to jihadist organizations, with fewer than 10,000 Americans on the list at the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term.

But the second Trump administration has renamed the TSC to focus on broadly defined “threats,” and oriented it toward groups the administration deems subversive—a change that has received little media coverage. Last year, the White House published National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), which instructed the entire national security apparatus to focus on incredibly broad threats, including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity;…extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The FBI’s procurement request for predictive AI explicitly mentions NSPM-7, although the reference is likely connected to a 2017 directive of the same name that expanded intelligence sharing between federal agencies about watch-listed people and groups. Nonetheless, the TSC is actively involved in carrying out the mandates of the more recent NSPM-7: “TSC also supports law enforcement and other communities at the federal, state, local, tribal, and international partners as established by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 6 and more recently, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7,” the document reads. “To help carry out its mission, the TSC requires enhanced technical solutions that will assist its operational staff by providing automation of time-intensive, repeatable manual tasks entailing large volumes of data across multiple domains.”

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DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge

“Wouldn’t it be the most ridiculous story ever told, if the boy who couldn’t read and write at 18 gets a PhD before he’s 30?”

Those are the words of Jason Arday—the 2002 Professorial Chair in the Sociology of Education at Cambridge University. Indeed, the story of his metamorphosis from arguably the most disadvantaged person in the UK to elite scholar-athlete-philanthropist would make even Walt Disney raise an eyebrow.

Born to Ghanaian parents, Arday grew up on a council estate (the British equivalent of Section 8 housing) in south London. At age three he was diagnosed with global development delay and autism. Therapists said he would be confined to an assisted living facility. Miraculously, at 11 years old, he spoke his first word (“hello”). When he was 18, he learned to read and write.

Under the influence of a white high school teacher who “gave [him] agency,” Arday pursued higher education. After receiving a PhD from Liverpool John Moores University, he rocketed up the academic ladder as a scholar of racism, education, and inequality. In three years he went from senior lecturer at Roehampton (2018) to associate professor at Durham (2019) to professor at Glasgow (2021). Ivy League universities (plural) tried to recruit him, but he had his heart set on Oxford or Cambridge. In 2023, at age 37, he became the youngest black full professor in the history of Cambridge. He is one of the youngest people of any race to ever hold a chair professorship at Oxbridge.

In his spare time, Arday ran 30 marathons in 35 days and 300 miles in three days.

As of 2023, he had worked with “more than 70” charities and raised more than £5 million.

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xAI Challenges Minnesota’s Broad “Nudification” Law as a First Amendment Violation

On May 1st, President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated picture of himself to Truth Social. He is floating in the reflecting pool on the National Mall on a gold inner tube, shirtless, giving a thumbs up. J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum are in the water beside him, also shirtless. A woman in a checked bikini reclines at one edge of the picture. The joke was about the money being spent repairing the pool.

From August 1st, making that picture in Minnesota could expose the company whose software produced it to a civil penalty of $500,000. Make ten of them and the exposure is $5 million. The people depicted could sue separately for triple damages, punitive damages and legal fees.

That image appears on page 19 of a complaint xAI filed on 27 July in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, asking a federal judge to stop the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, from enforcing House File 1606. The law is the first of its kind in the United States. It targets the software, not the people who make deepfakes or the people who spread them.

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here. 

Minnesota has a problem it is trying to solve but statute the legislature actually wrote reaches an enormous amount of ordinary, protected speech.

What HF 1606 does

The operative text is now Minn. Stat. § 325E.91. It says that a person who owns or controls a website, application, software, program or other service must not “allow a user to access, download, or use” that service “to nudify an image or video,” and must not nudify an image on a user’s behalf. A separate subdivision bans advertising or promoting such a service.

The violation belongs to the owner. The conduct belongs to the user. The person who makes the image, the person who posts it to a group chat, the person who emails it to the subject’s employer: subdivision 2 touches none of them. The statute’s entire enforcement weight lands on whoever built the tool.

“Nudify” is defined as altering or generating an image so that it depicts “an intimate part not depicted in an original unaltered image or video of an identifiable individual,” where the result is realistic enough that a reasonable person would believe the body part belongs to that person.

The whole statute turns on what counts as an intimate part. And here the legislature made a choice that will probably decide the case.

The definition that swallowed the law

For “intimate part,” HF 1606 borrows a definition from Minn. Stat. § 609.341, subdivision 5, part of Minnesota’s criminal sexual conduct code. That statute defines intimate parts to include “the primary genital area, groin, inner thigh, buttocks, or breast of a human being.”

That definition was written to determine when unwanted touching becomes criminal sexual contact. There it makes obvious sense: grabbing someone’s thigh or breast without consent is an assault regardless of what they were wearing. Transplanted into a statute about images, the same list produces something else entirely. Inner thighs are visible in shorts. Buttocks are visible in swimwear. Men’s “breasts” are visible any time a man takes his shirt off. The definition is also open-ended since the statute says the term “includes” those areas rather than limiting it to them.

The shirtless reflecting pool image is covered. So is an image a user made of a former and current governor from opposite sides of the political spectrum in a sumo match, which xAI reproduces on page 20 of its filing; both individuals’ breasts and inner thighs have been “depicted” where they were not before. So is a viral picture of Trump, Xi Jinping, Elon Musk and Tim Cook eating skewers on a Chinese street in vests and shorts.

The legislature knew about the alternative. As introduced in February 2025, HF 1606 cross-referenced Minnesota’s existing deepfake statute, which uses a much tighter list: the genitals, pubic area, anus, or a partially or fully exposed nipple. That version names discrete anatomical features rather than whole regions of the body. Lawmakers considered it and adopted the broader one instead. A court asked to save the statute by reading it narrowly will have to explain why the legislature’s deliberate rejection of the narrow definition should be undone by judicial construction.

The second definitional term is nearly as loose. An “identifiable individual” is someone identifiable “from the image itself, by the person depicted in the image, or by another person,” or from personal information displayed alongside it. The only genuine limit in the statute is realism, which means photorealistic output is regulated and cartoons are not.

The statute is silent on consent. An adult editing a photograph of themselves triggers the same liability as a stranger targeting a classmate. The omission was deliberate. When a Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee staffer flagged during a February hearing that the prohibition “applies to consensual images,” the bill’s Senate sponsor, Erin Maye Quade, explained “that is intentional.”

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Setting Marijuana Taxes Too High Drives Consumers To The Illegal Market, Federally Funded Study Finds

States that impose high tax rates on regulated marijuana products are driving adult consumers to the illicit market, according to a new federally funded study.

The research, published in the journal Health Economics, looked at past-month cannabis purchasing behavior of 1,525 adults aged 21 and older.

Researchers with Ohio State University found that high cannabis taxes and prices are linked to “lower cannabis consumption and THC intake” from legal purchases, but that the majority of those reductions (89 percent) may be offset by consumers switching to unregulated products from the illegal market.

“If the illegal market is restricted, policymakers can expect increasing cannabis prices using excise taxes to reduce both unit and THC consumption, while generating tax revenues,” the study said. “However, given the sizable illegal market, a large portion of the consumption reduction due to taxes may be offset by switching to illegal products.”

States have worked to strike a balance between pricing marijuana low enough to transition adults to the regulated market but still high enough to generate revenue. The results so far have been mixed, with no firmly established universal price or tax rate.

States that impose high tax rates on regulated marijuana products are driving adult consumers to the illicit market, according to a new federally funded study.

The research, published in the journal Health Economics, looked at past-month cannabis purchasing behavior of 1,525 adults aged 21 and older.

Researchers with Ohio State University found that high cannabis taxes and prices are linked to “lower cannabis consumption and THC intake” from legal purchases, but that the majority of those reductions (89 percent) may be offset by consumers switching to unregulated products from the illegal market.

“If the illegal market is restricted, policymakers can expect increasing cannabis prices using excise taxes to reduce both unit and THC consumption, while generating tax revenues,” the study said. “However, given the sizable illegal market, a large portion of the consumption reduction due to taxes may be offset by switching to illegal products.”

States have worked to strike a balance between pricing marijuana low enough to transition adults to the regulated market but still high enough to generate revenue. The results so far have been mixed, with no firmly established universal price or tax rate.

The study, meanwhile, also demonstrated that legal and illicit cannabis flower are essentially “substitutes for each other.”

Raising the price of legal cannabis flower by 10 percent “results in a 0.9 percent-1 percent increase in illegal flower consumption (units and THC),” and the inverse follows a similar pattern, the researchers found.

“While the cross‐price elasticities for unit demand between legal and illegal flowers are symmetric (not statistically significant), the cross elasticities for THC demand suggest that the increase in THC from illegal flowers in response to higher legal flower prices exceeds the increase from legal flowers in response to higher illegal flower prices.”

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Pharma Looks to Cash in on Psychedelics as Patients Seek Alternatives to Psychotropic Drugs for Depression

Eli Lilly’s multibillion-dollar acquisition of AtaiBeckley marks the largest pharmaceutical investment yet in psychedelic medicine, signaling a new phase for an industry once relegated to the margins of scientific research.

The deal, valued at approximately $2.8 billion upfront with up to $1 billion in additional milestone payments, gives Lilly control of AtaiBeckley’s experimental psychedelic therapies, including BPL-003, a fast-acting nasal spray containing N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) being studied for treatment-resistant depression.

AtaiBeckley announced in October 2025 that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted BPL-003 Breakthrough Therapy designation, a status intended to accelerate development of treatments for serious conditions when early evidence suggests substantial improvement over existing options.

“Millions of people are still searching for relief and desperately need a therapy that works,” said Dr. Carole Ho, president of Lilly Neuroscience. Advancing AtaiBeckley’s therapies, she said, gives Lilly “a real chance to change that.”

The company’s purchase comes as pharmaceutical companies increasingly move into a field that has attracted growing scientific interest but remains controversial because of questions surrounding commercialization, access, intellectual property — and whether corporate development will preserve the therapeutic models that shaped psychedelic research.

A turning point for psychedelic medicine

The Lilly-AtaiBeckley acquisition follows another major pharmaceutical investment in the sector. In 2025, AbbVie agreed to acquire Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals’ experimental depression treatment Bretisilocin (GM-2505) in a deal worth up to $1.2 billion.

Bretisilocin targets the brain’s 5-HT2A serotonin receptor, the same receptor involved in the effects of classic psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD.

Together, the deals suggest that major drugmakers increasingly view psychedelic compounds as a potential new category of mental health treatments.

Rayyan Zafar, Ph.D., a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College London and member of the Centre for Psychedelic Research and Neuropsychopharmacology group, said the Lilly acquisition could help move psychedelics closer to popular medical use by making them “de-risked” for mental health utilization.

Pharmaceutical investment could extend past drug development by encouraging dialogue about insurance coverage and healthcare infrastructure needed to deliver new treatments, Zafar said.

“Beyond psychedelic clinical trials, it could also help stimulate broader discussion around reimbursement pathways and stimulate other public healthcare systems to begin preparing for rollout,” he added.

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