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.

Cyberattack Targets French Blood Bank Fridges

A cyberattack against the refrigerator systems of France’s public blood service was thwarted on Monday, officials have said, the incident coming after supermarkets across Europe reported that their cooling equipment was targeted by hackers.

The French Blood Establishment (EFS) said in a Nov. 3 statement that one of its refrigeration equipment suppliers had been targeted, resulting in temperatures being forced to rise in the cold storage rooms at three of its sites.

“The EFS’s monitoring and alarm systems enabled the rapid identification of these anomalies and the implementation of necessary measures to ensure that no blood samples or products were compromised,” the statement said.

It said that affected equipment was brought under control and that no blood products or samples were impacted or ruined.

It added that blood products, including plasma needed for transfusion, which had been stored in these rooms, were transferred to other facilities as a precaution.

Service to patients was not interrupted by the incident, the EFS said.

The EFS stressed that it was not targeted itself, but rather the equipment supplier was.

The organization stores blood products, including plasma, in its preparation and distribution sites before they are sent on to hospitals and other kinds of healthcare facilities. It also keeps blood samples for its biobanks.

France’s National Cybersecurity Agency, or ANSSI, and the French Ministry of Health are investigating the incident, the EFS said.

The cyberattack follows incidents across Europe on Monday, where supermarkets reported their freezers and refrigerators being tampered with remotely, with temperatures being forced to rise.

European Supermarket Refrigerators Hacked

On Nov. 2, several supermarket chains across a number of countries in Europe reported hacks that forced temperatures in their store refrigerators and freezers to rise to 122 degrees Fahrenheit.

Countries affected include Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Italy, and Germany. Several stores were forced to throw away food.

Frank Groenewegen, cybersecurity expert at Deloitte in The Hague, said that retailers should identify whether their refrigerator and freezer controllers are vulnerable, and, if they are networked, ensure the system has the latest security updates.

“If they don’t even know, then remove them from the public internet immediately,” he said.

“With disconnecting, you haven’t fixed the root cause but you’ve at least isolated those systems so that an attacker is not able to do this anymore.”

Many European supermarkets are run by independent business owners in a cooperative structure, meaning their systems might not be the same as other stores under the brand.

However, even integrated supermarket groups were hit. French multinational supermarket Carrefour, which had 80 franchised stores subjected to cyberattacks last month, experienced attacks against 15 stores in Belgium on Monday.

The incidents follow an October attack in France, in which hackers remotely took control of refrigeration systems in hundreds of supermarkets and independent stores across the country, also forcing temperatures to rise.

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If You Lie to Voters About Not Starting a New War, the Voters Make You Pay

American voters have a long memory for one particular kind of broken promise. Tell them you will keep their sons out of a foreign war, then march them into one, and they will eventually send you a bill. In 1920 the Democrats paid it. On Tuesday, the Republicans did.

On election night 2024, Donald Trump told a cheering crowd, “I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop wars.” Fifteen months later came Operation Epic Fury. Eight months after that, CBS News projects that Democrats will take both the House and the Senate. JD Vance, never one to bury the lede, summed it up on X: “The reason we lost is the war.”

Woodrow Wilson would have understood. He ran in 1916 on a slogan that a century of history teachers have never let anyone forget.

He kept us out of war, briefly

“He kept us out of war” carried Wilson to a narrow second term in November 1916. The voters took it as a pledge. It lasted about a month into his second term. On April 2, 1917, Wilson went before Congress and asked for a declaration of war against Germany. Congress obliged four days later.

What followed was not what the brochure promised. The draft came. So did the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, which made criticizing the war a good way to land in prison. More than 100,000 Americans died in uniform. At home, prices soared.

The voters started sending invoices early. In October 1918, Wilson publicly asked them to return a Democratic Congress as a vote of confidence. They returned a Republican one instead, in both chambers. Then came the hangover: the Senate’s rejection of Wilson’s League of Nations, his stroke in the fall of 1919, a wave of strikes, the Red Scare and a sharp postwar slump.

In 1920 the Democrats nominated James Cox, with a young Franklin Roosevelt as his running mate. The Republicans nominated Warren Harding, a man of no particular distinction who promised a “return to normalcy.” Harding took about 60 percent of the popular vote and 404 electoral votes to Cox’s 127. It was the most lopsided popular-vote margin of its era. Voters were not endorsing Harding so much as firing Wilson’s war.

No more wars, he said

Trump did not have a slogan as tidy as Wilson’s. He had something better: a promise repeated so often that it became the soundtrack of the 2024 campaign. At the Republican convention he boasted, “I don’t have wars.” At a Pennsylvania rally that August he said, “we will have no more wars.” On election night it was “I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop wars.” At his inauguration he said success would be measured partly by the wars America never gets into.

Then, on February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel went to war with Iran. Hormuz closed. Brent crude was still around $110 this week, about 50 percent above where it sat before the war. Every voter who filled a tank this year got a reminder.

By June, Trump had found a new position on his old promise. “I didn’t guarantee no war,” he told NBC. CNN’s fact-checkers helpfully listed the times he had done precisely that. Voters were not persuaded either. In a Fox News poll in September, more than 60 percent called the war the wrong decision and 71 percent said the administration lacked a clear strategy for ending it. Trump’s approval going into Election Day averaged about 38 percent.

Tuesday was the bill. CBS projects Democrats will hold somewhere between 251 and 268 House seats and at least 54 in the Senate. James Talarico beat Ken Paxton in Texas. Sherrod Brown is back in Ohio. Troy Jackson took Susan Collins’s seat in Maine. Vance blamed the war. Trump, asked about it, said it was “largely true” that the war cost Republicans seats. Then he blamed the gas prices instead, as though they had arrived from another planet. As for the war itself, Trump’s explanation was “You have no choice.”

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COVID-Dissident Doctor Arrested For “Insulting” Berlin Mayor

A German doctor who rose to prominence during the Covid period for his criticism of the Covid-response measures has been arrested in Berlin in connection with “insults” of Berlin’s outgoing Mayor Kai Wegner. Paul Brandenburg, who has several social media channels and a podcast, has previously been the target of numerous other German speech-crime investigations and charges. Although a native Berliner, he presently lives in Switzerland. He was arrested at Berlin’s Willy Brandt airport last Wednesday in the company of his 10 year-old child. According to his lawyer Markus Haintz, he was travelling with the child, who still lives in Berlin.

“Insults” are a crime under Section 185 of the German Criminal Code. Under Section 188 of the Criminal Code, Germany’s so-called lèse-majesté law, public officials like Wegner enjoy heightened protection against “insults” as well as against “malicious gossip” and defamation, which is treated as a crime not a tort.

According to Haintz, Brandenburg is being investigated in connection with four charges of simple “insults” of Wegner and two charges of defamation under the lèse-majesté law.

Although German speech crime charges rarely result in arrests, the Berlin public prosecutor’s office told the German alternative media outlet Apollo News that Brandenburg was arrested because he represented a “flight risk”. In addition, the prosecutor’s office noted that defamation under the lèse-majesté law carries a minimum sentence of six months in prison. It also referred to prior convictions. Brandenburg is reported to have ignored prior fines.

All of Brandenburg’s alleged “insults” of Wegner allude in one way or another to the Berlin government’s association with the Berlin-based drag queen and trans-activist who goes by the stage-name Jurassica Parka. Parka’s real name is Mario Olszinski. In September, Olszinski was convicted of the possession of child pornography by the Berlin Regional Court and sentenced to 10 months in prison with probation. He had already been convicted of distributing “child pornographic writings” in 2023.

The investigation that led to Olszinski’s latest conviction was opened following receipt of a tip on Olszinski’s online activities from the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. According to numerous reports in the German press, the investigation was opened in May 2025. Nonetheless, two months later, on July 14th, none other than ‘Jurassica Parka’ hosted a gala sponsored by none other than the Berlin police! Olszinski’s home was raided by the police that very month, according to some reports before and other reports after the gala.

Be that as it may, the gala was dedicated to raising money for alleged queer victims of ‘hate crimes’, which in Germany may also include ‘hate speech’. The event was titled Gemeinsambunt, which roughly translates as ‘Diversely Together’. The official patron of the event was Berlin police chief Barbara Slowik. Deputy police chief Marco Langner posed with Olszinski. Olszinski wore a miniskirt; Langner a Scottish kilt.

According to Apollo News, Wegner was also present. Wegner is, incidentally, a member of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party. One year earlier, according to Apollo News, ‘Jurassica Parka’ hosted another event sponsored by the Berlin government. This one was titled “Queens and Flowers” and included a “Drag-Queen Reading Hour” for children.

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Meaningless Midterms in Terms of Liberty

To grasp the meaninglessness of the midterm elections in terms of liberty, let’s consider some of the important pro-liberty positions that did not get discussed by Republicans and Democrats in the races for U.S. House and U.S. Senate:

1. Open borders. There was never any discussion about open borders, which is the only solution to America’s lifelong immigration morass. The entire discussion was about how to manage and reform the federal government’s decades-old, deadly, and destructive immigration-control system and the nationwide immigration police state that comes with it. Every candidate had a “plan” for making this tyrannical system finally work.

2. The drug war. There was no discussion on legalizing all drugs and bringing an end to the federal government’s lifelong deadly war on drugs and the drug-war police state that has contributed to the destruction of liberty and privacy of the American people. There was no condemnation of the Pentagon’s drug-war assassinations of people who have never been convicted of a drug offense. Any discussion about the drug war, at most, involved legalizing marijuana.

3. The welfare state, especially Social Security and Medicare, which are the crown jewels of American socialism. No discussion on the immediate repeal of all welfare-state programs. Instead, every candidate had a “plan” for saving and reforming the welfare state.

4. The national-security state — i.e., the Pentagon, the vast military-intelligence establishment, the ever-growing army of fat-cat “defense” contractors, the CIA, and the NSA. No discussion about dismantling this omnipotent governmental apparatus and restoring America’s founding system of a limited-government republic. All we heard was the standard militarist claptrap about a “strong national defense” and a “well-armed America” to protect us from the scary official bogeymen, including illegal immigrants, drug dealers, terrorists, communists, Russia, Cuba, China, and others.

5. Foreign interventionism. No condemnation of the federal government’s policy of invasions, occupation, wars of aggression, sanctions, and embargoes, including the decades-old economic war on the Cuban people. Oh sure, some candidates criticized Trump’s war on Iran, but their criticism focused on its lack of success rather than on the immorality of foreign interventionism itself. There was no condemnation of the U.S. military’s deadly drug-war raid on Venezuela and the violent and deadly kidnapping of Venezuela’s ruler. That’s because Venezuela is considered a “successful” intervention. There was no condemnation of the U.S. government’s partnership with Venezuela’s tyrannical socialist-communist regime.

6. The empire of military bases. There was no condemnation of the federal government’s empire of foreign and domestic military bases, including the imperialist base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

7. There were no calls to abolish the Federal Reserve, repeal legal-tender laws, and end the government’s paper-money system. There was no advocacy of a free-market monetary system or, at the very least, of a restoration of the gold standard. Instead, candidates had their own plans for reforming the Fed in the hope that it would no longer debase people’s money.

8. There was no condemnation of America’s system of federal income taxation. There were no calls for restoring the right of people to keep everything they earn and to decide for themselves what to do with their own money.

9. There were no calls for a constitutional separation of trade and the state, which would mean a permanent end to tariffs, trade restrictions, and trade wars.

10. There were no calls to separate healthcare and the state, including the immediate abolition of Medicare, Medicaid, the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other federal healthcare agencies and programs.

11. There were no calls for a constitutional separation of education and the state.

Instead, candidates offered plans, including school vouchers, for making America’s socialist system of education finally succeed.

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The Future Of The Pentagon’s New Autonomous Warfare Command

At last month’s Association of the United States Army (AUSA) conference in Washington, D.C., Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, joined on a panel by the interim leadership tasked to stand it up, reaffirmed plans for something the Pentagon has been inching toward for a decade: a four-star United States Autonomous Warfare Command (AUTOWARCOM), built to pull artificial intelligence (AI), drones, and robotic systems out of a dozen scattered service programs and into one joint structure. Hegseth called it “the fastest peacetime shift in modern military history” and said drone warfare “supercharged by AI-enabled targeting is the biggest battlefield revolution in generations.”

The announcement left the central question implied rather than answered: how will AUTOWARCOM change the way the United States fights? The answer is already taking shape in four missions that have always depended on putting people in harm’s way: intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR); strike; casualty evacuation; and personnel recovery. In each, autonomy is rewriting the operational math. In each, the progress is scattered across separate program offices. AUTOWARCOM is the Pentagon’s bet that one command can pull it together.

The Announcement

Hegseth first unveiled the command, known inside the building as AWC, on September 30, 2026, describing a four-star combatant command with “service-like authorities, built to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities across the joint force.” Lasting change, he said, “must be anchored in military command structures” rather than left to individual program offices. No commander has been named; Hegseth said the department will fill that seat “soon.”

According to Pentagon talking points, autonomy development will be “architected around mission threads and open interoperability standards,” so that systems “integrate organically into joint, all-domain” operations from the moment they are built, instead of being bolted onto single-service programs and retrofitted for everyone else. Put more bluntly: organize autonomy around the missions that matter, and build it to work across the joint force from day one.

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Trump’s Legacy Will Ultimately Be Determined By The Outcome Of The Third Gulf War

The Democrats retook control of Congress in an electoral bloodbath that decimated the Republicans during the midterms. Many had predicted that this would happen, and it’s not because of the Canadian meddling that the White House recently drew attention to or any other countries’ related efforts, but due to the cost of living surging as a result of the Third Gulf War that Trump initiated with Bibi. Higher oil prices naturally translated into higher prices across the board that hit average Americans very hard.

Trump earlier threatened to become “Mr. Veto” if the Republicans lost control of Congress, elaborating that the Supreme Court recently strengthened his executive authority, and his sharing on social media of a pic of a red hat with the word “VETO” on it after the results poured in suggests that he’s serious. That’s sensible since it would be illogical for him to pass up the opportunity to veto legislation against his agenda when the Democrats don’t have the two-thirds supermajority in both chambers to overrule him.

The Democrats will therefore have to either compromise over the next two years or the US will remain legislatively paralyzed with both sides blaming the other ahead of the next elections. The Democrats might also try to once again impeach Trump, but they lack the two-thirds supermajority in the Senate to oust him from office, so it would only be symbolic. In any case, Trump might pivot towards foreign policy if domestic policy is deadlocked, which could have important implications for many countries.

Chief among them is Iran since Trump’s legacy will ultimately be determined by the outcome of the Third Gulf War. Each side blames the other for perpetuating the conflict across the entire year, but just like the Democrats will have to compromise if they want any of their legislation to pass, so too must Trump compromise with Iran if he wants to save his legacy. The reason is simple and it’s that perpetuating the high cost of living sparked by higher oil prices will doom the Republicans in 2028.

The scenario of a Democrat president presiding over a Democrat-controlled Congress would spell the end of everything that Trump achieved at home and abroad during his second term, and it’s a credible scenario too since voters care more about the economy than foreign policy or so-called “culture wars”. About that, the Democrats’ landslide wouldn’t have happened without some Republicans either staying home or voting for the Democrats in protest, which they did due to their surging cost of living.

This doesn’t mean that they “betrayed” Trump or the causes that they supported just two years ago, however, since most of them likely believed that Trump would indeed become “Mr. Veto” to preserve his achievements for at least the next two years. What they wanted to do was simply show him that the higher cost of living that the Third Gulf War is responsible for, which many of them consider to be a voluntary war since they don’t believe that Iran was on the verge of building a nuke, is unacceptable.

Therefore, nothing would rejuvenate his base more than to swiftly compromise with Iran as a means of showing them that he heard their message loud and clear, which would then facilitate a gradual decrease in the cost of living that could restore the economy by 2028 and help the Republicans win.

If he remains bogged down in the Gulf or provokes Iran into obliterating the region’s energy infrastructure in retaliation for being nuked, for example, then MAGA will likely be swept into the dustbin of history.

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How the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic Became a Country

The former Soviet administrative unit that emerged as independent Ukraine in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union was bounded by the exact borders of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). That is, it comprised a wholly unnatural polity whose borders and population had been assembled by successive Soviet leaders for the administrative convenience of their brutal communist dictatorship.

Once the external scaffolding of this Moscow disappeared, that construct quickly polarized along regional and linguistic lines. The red-and-blue electoral map below supplies the generic illustration: Western and central oblasts (blue) delivered overwhelming majorities to candidates oriented toward Ukrainian language and Western institutions, while eastern and southern oblasts (red) – from Kharkiv through the Donbas and along the Black Sea rim including Crimea – delivered equally lopsided majorities to candidates favoring closer Russian ties and greater status for the Russian language.

Accordingly, national results stayed reasonably close; regional electoral results did not. The pattern amounted to a standing de facto referendum for partition.

The blue territories of Galicia and Volhynia had spent centuries inside the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Austrian Empire, developing under Greek-Catholic and later Polish institutions. The populations there had little affinity for both communism and Russian culture.

The red territories, by contrast, had been shaped by the Czarist Empire: Novorossiya, the Donbas, Kharkiv, and Crimea were settled or industrialized under Russian rule, with heavily Russian-speaking urban populations economically integrated with Russian economic markets and religiously tutored by the Russian Orthodox church.

Both zones carried scars from the depredations of the Second World War: The criss-cr0ssing of the lands first by the German occupation, then by Red Army reconquest. Those nightmarish experiences reinforced the older divergence.

In the first presidential election in December 1991 a recycled communist apparatchik, Leonid Kravchuk, won nationally with 61.6% of the vote on a national independence platform. Regional variation already existed – Kravchuk was stronger in the center and west, more pro-Russian candidates relatively stronger in the industrial east and Crimea.

But the simultaneous independence referendum that year and the popular relief from the oppression of Moscow rule masked the depth of the underlying split in the polity. So Kravchuk’s pro-independence moderation of 1991 did not last.

By the 2004 presidential election the cleavage had hardened. In the final December 2004 rerun, Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian nationalist candidate, received 15.1 million votes (52.0%) while the pro-Russian, Viktor Yanukovych, received 12.8 million votes (44.0 percent). The national margin was modest. But inside the regions, the vote gaps were huge.

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Washington State Voters Back Initiative to Block Trans Athletes from Girls’ Sports

Voters in Washington State are backing Initiative 638, a measure that would ban males who identify as female from playing on girls’ sports teams.

Initiative 638, also called the Sex Verification Requirements for Female School Sports Initiative, would prohibit biologically male students from competing with and against female students and would require girls to submit documents from their doctor stating that they were born female.

While votes are still being counted in Washington, as of Wednesday, the “yes” vote on the initiative led with 57 percent to the “no” vote of 43 percent, and it seems most likely that once counting is done, the “yes” votes will prevail.

“To every female athlete who wondered whether her voice mattered: tonight, Washington heard you,” said Brian Heywood, founder of Let’s Go Washington, the political organization backing the measure, according to the Washington State Standard. “Five years from now, I hope girl athletes don’t know this fight took place, because that will mean that boys know their place is not in girls’ sports.”

“This is a victory for girls like Frances, Ahnaleigh, Sadie, Bayley, Charlie, Sierra, and countless others who have been told time and again by the majority party that their voices and opportunities don’t matter. The opposition was working overtime to tell these girls that their experiences were made up and didn’t matter. Tonight, those girls see that well over a million Washingtonians stand with them and care that their sports are safe and fair. Voters have your backs,” Heywood added.

If the measure passes, it would require School boards, or other school governing entities, to create rules for what sex verification would look like. It would rely on “one or more” of the following: “the student’s reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels.”

Successful campaigns joined the effort in Washington State for similar bans on trans athletes in girls’ sports that passed in Nebraska and Arizona.

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Join the conspiracy…

“Adrenochrome is the subject of several conspiracy theories, including QAnon and Pizzagate, in which the chemical plays a similar role to Satanic ritual abuse stories. The theories commonly say that a cabal of Satanists rape and murder children, and harvest adrenochrome from their victims’ blood as a recreational drug or as an elixir of youth, as with children’s blood infusions In reality, adrenochrome has been produced by organic synthesis since at least 1952 and is synthesized for research purposes by biotechnology companies, which will then sell it to anyone; as it is not a controlled substance, medical or recreational use of the chemical is easy to access.”

Join the conspiracy HERE!

Flock License Plate Camera Density by State, Ranked

A Reclaim The Net analysis of the locations of Flock Safety license plate readers, mapped by volunteers, shows that there is one of these devices for every 1,200 people in Georgia.

This is the highest density in the US, more than double the national rate, and higher than any other state.

The numbers are based on 116,548 Flock cameras mapped across the country, and the US Census Bureau’s July 2025 estimates of the population. At the other end of the scale, New Hampshire has 19 mapped cameras, or 1.3 per 100,000 people.

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