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.

Discord to Demand Face Scan or ID to Access All Features

Discord is preparing to make age classification a constant background process across its platform. Beginning next month, every account will default to a teen-appropriate experience unless the user takes steps to prove adulthood.

Age determination will sit underneath routine activity, shaping what people can see, say, and join.

For accounts that are not verified as adult, access will narrow immediately. Age-restricted servers and channels will be blocked, voice participation in live “stage” channels will be disabled, and automated filters will apply to content Discord identifies as graphic or sensitive.

Friend requests from unfamiliar users will trigger warning prompts, and direct messages from unknown accounts will be routed into a separate inbox.

Core features such as direct messages with known contacts and servers without age restrictions will continue to function. Age-restricted servers will effectively disappear until verification is completed, including servers that a user joined years earlier.

The global rollout reflects a broader regulatory environment that is pushing platforms toward more aggressive age controls. Discord has already tested similar systems.

Last year, age checks were introduced in the UK and Australia.

For many adult users, the concern is less about access to content and more about surveillance and the ability to communicate anonymously. Verification systems introduce new forms of monitoring, whether through documents, facial analysis, or ongoing behavioral assessment.

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Ghislaine Maxwell Pleads the Fifth in Deposition With Lawmakers

Ghislaine Maxwell declined to answer questions on Feb. 9 in the House Oversight Committee’s probe of her longtime confidant, convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Maxwell invoked her Fifth Amendment right, which protects one from self-incrimination, in response to questions from the committee. She was interviewed by video conference as she was in a federal prison in Texas, where she is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking.

“As expected, Ghislaine Maxwell took the Fifth and refused to answer any questions. This obviously is very disappointing,” Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) told reporters after the deposition.

“We had many questions to ask about the crimes she and Epstein committed, as well as questions about potential co-conspirators. We sincerely want to get to the truth for the American people and justice for survivors.”

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) wrote in a Feb. 8 letter to Comer that Maxwell pleading the Fifth “appears inconsistent with Ms. Maxwell’s prior conduct, as she did not invoke the Fifth Amendment when she previously met with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to discuss substantially similar subject matter.”

Maxwell’s attorney, David Markus, told lawmakers that his client would be willing to testify that neither President Donald Trump nor former President Bill Clinton engaged in wrongdoing in their relationships with Epstein, according to both Democratic and Republican lawmakers who spoke after the closed-door deposition with Maxwell.

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North Carolina Democrat Sheriff Left Completely Humiliated After Repeatedly Botching a Simple U.S. Civics Question During Hearing

An elected official sworn to protect his county failed the most basic of civics questions in humiliating fashion on Monday.

As Axios reported, the North Carolina General Assembly interrogated Mecklenburg County Sheriff Garry McFadden, a Democrat, on a wide range of issues, including immigration and the deaths that occurred in county jails under his watch.

His handling of immigration received the most scrutiny, with many lawmakers blasting him for his handling of the murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska last August. Blood is on McFadden’s hands because a career criminal who had no business on the streets to begin with committed the offense.

The hearing then took a rough turn for McFadden when North Carolina Republican State Rep. Allen Chesser decided to test his constitutional knowledge with a very basic question: What branch of government does McFadden operate under?

The correct answer, of course, is the executive branch, given a sheriff’s role in enforcing laws. But a clueless McFadden instead repeatedly gave the wrong answer, saying “Mecklenberg County” and “the U.S. Constitution.”

Chesser then asked McFadden how many branches of government exist (three). Unsurprisingly, the sheriff had no clue.

The Republican lawmaker went on to name the three branches (Legislative, Executive, and Judicial) to save time and asked McFadden again which branch he operated under.

Even with a multiple-choice version of the question, McFadden still got it wrong. He told Chesser his department fell under the judicial branch.

Then Chesser finally broke the truth to him.

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The Lost Dog That Made Constant Surveillance Feel Like a Favor

Amazon picked the Super Bowl for a reason. Nothing softens a technological land grab like a few million viewers, a calm voice, and a lost dog.

Ring’s commercial introduced “Search Party,” a feature that links doorbell cameras through AI and asks users to help find missing pets. The tone was gentle despite the scale being enormous.

Jamie Siminoff, Ring’s founder, narrated the ad over images of taped-up dog posters and surveillance footage polished to look comforting rather than clinical. “Pets are family, but every year, 10 million go missing,” he said. The answer arrived on cue. “Search Party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs.”

This aired during a broadcast already stuffed with AI branding, where commercial breaks felt increasingly automated. Ring’s spot stood out because it described a system already deployed across American neighborhoods rather than a future promise.

Search Party lets users post a missing dog alert through the Ring app. Participating outdoor cameras then scan their footage for dogs resembling the report. When the system flags a possible match, the camera owner receives an alert and can decide whether to share the clip.

Siminoff framed the feature as a community upgrade. “Before Search Party, the best you could do was drive up and down the neighborhood, shouting your dog’s name in hopes of finding them,” he said.

The new setup allows entire neighborhoods to participate at once. He emphasized that it is “available to everyone for free right now” in the US, including people without Ring cameras.

Amazon paired the launch with a $1 million initiative to equip more than 4,000 animal shelters with Ring systems. The company says the goal is faster reunification and shorter shelter stays.

Every element of the rollout leaned toward public service language.

The system described in the ad already performs pattern detection, object recognition, and automated scanning across a wide network of private cameras.

The same system that scans footage for a missing dog already supports far broader forms of identification. Software built to recognize an animal by color and shape also supports license plate reading, facial recognition, and searches based on physical description.

Ring already operates a process that allows police to obtain footage without a warrant under situations they classify as emergencies. Once those capabilities exist inside a shared camera network, expanding their use becomes a matter of policy choice rather than technical limitation.

Ring also typically enables new AI features by default, leaving users responsible for finding the controls to disable them.

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Fulton County Short by Over Forty (40) Boxes According to Affidavit; County Requests Court to Order DOJ Return Evidence

Last month, the FBI executed a search warrant in Fulton County to take possession of election records that were retained under a court-ordered injunction.  The Gateway Pundit reported on the contents outlined in the search warrant, including all physical ballots, all tabulator tapes, all ballot images, and all voter rolls for the 2020 election.

Several of those items will be difficult to produce according to previous responses to open records requests lawfully seeking them.  For example, Fulton County only provided 9 of 148 tabulator zero tapes for advance voting tabulators, despite repeated attempts to compel them to provide more.

Fulton County provided tabulator almost all of the closing tapes for advance voting, which show the total votes cast and the results for each specific tabulator.  Georgia rules and regulations require those tapes be signed by the precinct manager and two witnesses; however, none of the required signatures were present on each tape.

The advance voting tabulators were instead brought back to the county’s election warehouse where each memory card was removed from the 148 tabulators and then “closed out” on 16 separate tabulators, as reported by The Gateway Pundit.  

“All ballot images produced during the original ballot count beginning on November 3, 2020” will also prove difficult to produce.  During a Request for Admissions conducted on behalf of plaintiffs in Curling v. Raffensperger, Fulton County admitted that they failed to preserve “the majority of ballot images from in-person voting.”

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Inside Dem Socialists’ extreme plan for Los Angeles — seizing property, replacing cops and closing jails

A radical left-wing group in Los Angeles has published a shocking 40-page roadmap to transform the nation’s second-largest city into a bizarre socialist experiment.

The Democratic Socialists of America’s LA chapter wants to straight-up seize private property through a “creative use of eminent domain,” take control of your neighborhood grocery store, and replace cops with unarmed social workers while shutting down jails.

Their Communist fever dream wishlist includes banning Airbnbs, grabbing golf courses for public housing, allowing noncitizen immigrants to vote in local elections, enforce a school curriculum that supports social justice, and eliminating all fossil fuel use by 2035.

The 3,500 member group has already helped elect several candidates to local office, and previously backed Nithya Raman, a DSA-member now running for mayor. They openly trash the Democratic Party establishment as capitalist sellouts and want to build “working class power” through what they call a “socialist mass organization.”

The manifesto, published in 2025 is more than 9,000-words long and gives an insight into the policies that a potential Mayor Raman has signed up to as a DSA member and could try to implement in LA. It targets the “status quo coalition” of elected officials, real estate developers, billionaires, nonprofits, and even some union leaders who’ve supposedly sold out workers.

They think they can actually pull this off in six to eight years through local elections and organizing.

“We are on the burning edge of the economic, climate, and moral crises that define this generation,” the manifesto warns, adding ominously: “The choice remains socialism or barbarism.”

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Real Estate Company Slammed for Blatantly Anti-White Super Bowl Commercial

On the field, Super Bowl LX looked a lot like the last time the Seattle Seahawks won the NFL championship.

Indeed, Sunday’s 29-13 win over the New England Patriots called to mind Seattle’s 43-8 drubbing of the Denver Broncos in early 2014, when the Seahawks’ defense smothered an overmatched opponent in a game that never really had a competitive phase.

How fitting, therefore, that the real estate company Redfin — much to the chagrin of users on the social media platform X — gave Super Bowl viewers a commercial reminiscent of the race-mongering of President Barack Obama’s years, albeit with a predictable update tailored to the age of President Donald Trump.

Not to mix sporting metaphors, but the Redfin ad, shorn of its subversive politics, could have hit a home run.

The ad began by showing two young girls, perhaps in their early teens, from two different families. Each girl looked forlorn as she contemplated her family’s move into a new home.

It bears noting, only because of the ad’s politics, that the first girl was Hispanic and the second girl was white. One suspects that most viewers would not have noticed as much if not for the subsequent injection of politics.

The two girls crossed paths about 20 seconds into the ad. At that point, the white girl’s dog barked at the Hispanic girl, which kept the two girls from saying hello.

Even then, however, nothing seemed amiss. In fact, the young white girl, having waved at a group of girls on bicycles and received only snarky comments in return, seemed the lonelier and more ostracized of the two.

The anti-white racism began approximately 24 seconds into the ad, when the Hispanic girl’s father tried to strike up a conversation about an impending thunderstorm with an older white man next door. Naturally, the older white man, who flew an American flag and had a pickup truck parked in his driveway, ignored him.

Then came the drama. During the storm, the white girl’s dog escaped her home. A frantic search ensued.

Happily, the young Hispanic girl found the dog and returned it to its grateful owner. The white girl hugged her dog’s rescuer. From there, the two girls rode bikes together and presumably became friends.

Again, shorn of its politics, the ad would have delivered a wonderful message.

Instead, Redfin decided to make a not-so-subtle political statement that undoubtedly appealed to virtue-signaling liberals everywhere.

“America could use a neighbor just like you,” the ad’s final message read.

The company even highlighted that message when it posted the ad on X.

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New Mexico Dems Could Pass Broadest Gun Ban in U.S. This Week

For the past several years, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has been demanding the Democrat-controlled legislature deliver an “assault weapon” ban to her desk, and each and every session her fellow Democrats have declined to do so. In Grisham’s last year in office, though, Democrats are poised to deliver exactly what she wants; a bill that would take almost every semi-automatic long gun off the market in the Land of Enchantment.

New Mexico is in the middle of a 30-day session that’s supposed to be limited to budgetary issues only. Instead, Democrats are pushing a number of policy proposals, including SB 17, which would ban the sale and transfer of every gas-operated centerfire rifle that can accept a detachable magazine (along with those guns that have fixed magazine capacity of more than ten rounds), detachable magazines that can hold more than ten rounds of ammunition, and .50 BMG rifles, along with imposing a host of new regulations and restrictions on federally licensed firearms retailers. 

On Saturday afternoon the state Senate approved SB 17 along mostly party lines and sent the constitutional abomination on to the House, where it could come up for a vote as early as this week. 

“We have data that shows a lot of the gun crime in New Mexico is coming from guns sold at our local dealers, and we want the state to be able to also regulate and ensure those sales at our gun dealers here are responsible, are not straw purchases, and are happening as they should,” said state Sen. Heather Berghmans.

She says it would require gun shops to have more security measures, more training, keep thorough reports of sales and inventory, and their employees must be 21 years or older.

Yes, most guns used in crimes were originally sold by an FFL. That doesn’t mean, however, that New Mexico gun stores are doing anything wrong. That figure accounts for guns that are stolen or given to criminals by family and friends, along with straw purchases (which also can and do take place without the willing involvement of FFLs). 

Imposting these new requirements on FFL’s isn’t about stopping criminals from getting ahold of guns. It’s about making the process of being a gun store owner more difficult to navigate, more expensive to conduct business, and more legally dangerous to help people exercise a fundamental civil right. 

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Labor Dept Orders Lawyers: Cut Ties with ‘Radical’ ABA Activist Group

On Monday, the Department of Labor’s Trump-appointed Solicitor Jonathan Berry told staff to stop engaging with the American Bar Association (ABA) in their official capacities.

Berry noted in an email to Fox News Digital that the organization “engages in liberal activism and that any federal participation would only boost its influence.”

Per Fox News:

Trump-appointed Solicitor Jonathan Berry wrote in an email that the hundreds of attorneys at the Department of Labor are not to use taxpayer funds to participate in any ABA events or use their government job titles at them, according to a copy of the email reviewed by Fox News Digital.

“The ABA is strategically equivocal about its ideological stance,” Berry wrote. “Equivocal in that the ABA holds itself out as non-ideological at certain times, but takes decidedly radical ideological positions at others.”

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“There is genuine benefit to our attorneys engaging with the employer bar in ABA programs, but the benefit genuinely feeds the problem too: Our participation in ‘neutral’ ABA events contributes to institutional stature the ABA leverages to advance radical goals as if they were ‘neutral,’” Berry wrote. “No more.”

ABA, a voluntary professional organization for lawyers that describes itself as nonpartisan, is supposed to focus on advancing the “rule of law, professional standards, and access to justice.”

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Mystery Biotech Explosion Kills 8 in China, Company Legal Rep Arrested

Chinese state media agencies confirmed a massive explosion taking place at a facility owned by a biotechnology company killed at least eight people in Shanxi, northern China this weekend.

Multiple Asian news outlets identified the company involved as Shanyin Jiapeng Bio-Technology, which reportedly manufactures a host of chemicals including agricultural products and paint. None of the reports on the incident indicate any known reason for the explosion, indicating that investigations are still ongoing. The government’s Xinhua News Agency reported that the Communist Party had detained the company’s legal representative, stating that he or she was “placed under control” without any details. It remains unclear at press time why the legal representative, and no other employee of the company, was targeted.

China has a long history of industrial, chemical, and scientific research accidents, as well as corporate misconduct and corruption. Among the various scandalous incidents involving biochemical or industrial corporations is the infamous 2015 Tianjin explosion that killed 173 people, the Changsheng Biotech scandal in which nearly 1 million children were administered ineffective or watered-down vaccines, and the ongoing investigation into potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.

“An explosion that occurred in the early hours of Saturday at a biotechnology company in Shuozhou, North China’s Shanxi Province has resulted in eight fatalities as of 9:30 am Sunday,” the Chinese state newspaper Global Times reported on Sunday, “and the cause of the incident is still under investigation.”

“The company is located in a mountainous area more than 40 kilometers from the county seat. At the accident site, Xinhua reporters saw thick yellowish smoke still billowing, as emergency response and cleanup operations continued,” the outlet added. The Global Times described search and rescue crews being forced to dig deep into the complex to find all the known working crew and finding multiple bodies — suggesting that more victims could still be found.

The investigation into the incident is reportedly in the hands of the State Council Work Safety Committee, suggesting that it may escalate to a national level. The state newspaper China Daily added, without directly linking this fact to the explosion, that “a nationwide campaign has also been launched to inspect and rectify illegal production sites involving hazardous chemicals and other related activities.”

The accident is the latest in several incidents that have resulted in calls for better control of chemical and pharmaceutical corporations in the country. The largest such incident occurred in 2015, when nearly 200 people were killed by a massive explosion in Tianjin, northeast China. The explosion, equivalent to that of 21 tons of TNT, was found to be caused by unsafe storage of large amounts of sodium cyanide and resulted in the imprisonment of 49 individuals tied to Ruihai Logistics. The Communist Party accused the imprisoned of bribing local officials to store the chemicals illegally without facing repercussions.

In 2018, a scandal involving biotechnology consumed the nation. A massive pharmaceutical company, Changsheng Biotechnology, was caught administering watered-down or otherwise ineffective vaccines, then producing fake vaccine records, profiting tremendously by defrauding parents of vaccinated children. Multiple batches of vaccines totaling nearly 1 million doses were found to have not met the standards necessary to properly immunize the children involved. The Communist Party heavily condemned the company, resulting in dozens of arrests and criminal charges, and made a rare allowance for the parents of the affected children to protest publicly. In January 2019, a mob of angry parents staged a protest that ended with parents beating local officials for not properly enforcing regulations surrounding vaccines.

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