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.

NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani Announces Multi-Million ‘Investment’ in Gender Affirming Care, Weeks After Claiming City is in ‘Historic’ Budget Crisis

Back in April, New York City’s new Democratic Socialist (communist) Mayor Zohran Mamdani declared that the city was in the midst of an ‘historic’ budget crisis. He framed it as a very serious problem and even claimed that unless new sources of revenue were found, people would be denied various services.

Now, the mayor is announcing that his administration is making a $15 million ‘investment’ in providing ‘gender affirming care’ a term that is flowery language used to describe genital mutilation and the prescribing of hormones.

So which is it? Is the city really that broke, or is there really enough money to spend a cool $15 million on trans drugs and surgeries? And since when was it the responsibility of a city government to provide ANY of this to the people who live there?

Mamdani made the comments at a ‘Pride’ party at city hall.

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ActBlue CEO Repeatedly Pleads the Fifth as Congress Probes Foreign Donations

ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones repeatedly invoked her Fifth Amendment rights Wednesday during a congressional hearing on allegations the Democrat fundraising platform accepted foreign-linked donations.

Wallace-Jones declined to answer a series of questions from Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) regarding alleged foreign donations, fraud controls, and the departure of ActBlue’s legal team.

“On the advice of my counsel, I respectfully decline to answer this question pursuant to my Fifth Amendment rights under the Constitution.”

Jordan asked Wallace-Jones about reports that millions of contributions processed by ActBlue in 2024 showed signs of foreign origin.

“Your board chairman said 38 million contributions in 2024 had the signs of foreign origin,” Jordan said. “How much fraud is too much fraud?”

Wallace-Jones pleaded the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer. Jordan then asked how many foreign contributions ActBlue accepted and whether the platform received donations from Russia. Wallace-Jones again declined to respond.

The Ohio Republican also questioned Wallace-Jones about the departure of ActBlue’s in-house legal team and whether the fundraising platform had weakened its fraud-prevention standards.

“Why did your entire legal team quit?” Jordan asked.

Wallace-Jones invoked the Fifth Amendment. Jordan later asked whether ActBlue had weakened its fraud standards to benefit Democrat candidates, drawing the same response.

The hearing comes weeks after a congressional staff report accused ActBlue of accepting illegal foreign donations during the 2024 election cycle and covering up the activity. The report also claimed that every member of ActBlue’s legal and compliance team either resigned, was fired, or took extended leave. It cited subsequent media reports alleging that the departures were linked to concerns over the platform’s donation practices.

A separate congressional staff report released in 2025 alleged that two policy changes adopted by ActBlue in 2024 led to an increase in fraudulent contributions on the platform. Investigators further alleged that internal training materials instructed employees to search for reasons to approve donations rather than flag potentially suspicious transactions.

The House Administration Committee launched its probe of ActBlue in October 2023. In a letter to committee chairman Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI) that year, then-CEO Regina Wallace-Jones assured Congress that “only donations with passport information are processed.”

ActBlue has helped raise more than $19 billion for Democratic candidates and causes since its founding in 2004.

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An Unwarranted War, a Global Economic Drag

When the US-Iran conflict escalated earlier this year, the immediate concern centered on oil prices and the Strait of Hormuz.

But the real danger was never confined to crude oil. The crisis has evolved into a broader energy, logistics, fertilizer, food and financial shock.

What began as a regional conflict has become a structural drag on the global economy.

Prolonged pain

Recent warnings by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank underscore the same point.

Even if military hostilities continue to ease, energy systems, shipping networks and commodity supply chains will require many months – and in some cases years – to normalize. The result is likely to be a weaker global economy in the second half of 2026 and throughout 2027.

The core issue is persistence. The IMF warns that prolonged energy disruptions could push the world toward recessionary conditions. The World Bank expects rising energy prices in 2026, while the IEA reports tightening supplies, falling inventories and continuing refinery disruptions.

The world faces a prolonged period of elevated energy costs, fragmented trade routes, higher insurance premiums, supply-chain restructuring and slower productivity growth.

US: Resilient but increasingly stagflationary

The United States is better positioned than most advanced economies because of domestic energy production and continued AI-led investment. Yet, higher fuel, petrochemical and transport costs are already feeding through the economy.

Gasoline prices remain well above pre-war levels, while energy-intensive industries face sustained cost pressures.

Growth is likely to remain positive through 2027, but below pre-conflict expectations. Inflation may prove more persistent than policymakers anticipated.

The principal risk is not recession but a stagflationary environment characterized by slower growth, elevated prices and tighter financial conditions.

By targeting Iran’s strategic capabilities while expanding military deployments across the region, the US has contributed to a prolonged risk premium in global energy markets.

At the same time, it has left Europe, Japan, South Korea and much of the developing world highly vulnerable to the resulting energy shock.

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Jasmine Crockett’s Gaping Maw Is Still Belching Up Filth

After losing the Texas Democratic Senate primary to James “Beef Is Planet Murder” Talarico, I really expected Jasmine Crockett to start showing up in front of every camera she could find to scream “racism,” “sexism,” and whatever other permavictim “ism” she could think of. Democrats don’t deal with defeat very well, after all. 

Ultra-entitled Democrats like Crockett have no coping mechanisms for it whatsoever. 

Well, Crockett finally came out of her lair of resentment to offer her opinions on the (much too light) Karmelo Anthony verdict and sentence. This is from Catherine:

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), one of the most morally despicable stooges in Congress, claimed murdered teen Austin Metcalf’s family have never suffered as she suffers for being black, and that killer Karmelo Anthony was justified in randomly stabbing Metcalf to death.

The piece of human debris who, thank God, will soon be out of Congress, claimed, as the culmination of a lengthy and ignorant lecture on her show about the Anthony case, “Black women, especially black women who have black male children, live in fear and agony every single day — a fear and agony that I promise you the Metcalfs probably never spend a day living that way. And we’re going to have to have some real conversations about race in this country.” Yes, she actually claimed that, in 2026, simply having black skin brings more fear and sorrow into a person’s life than losing your son to a senseless, unjustified murder.

Crockett says “black” three times in the first ten words of one sentence, so she was really leaning into this playing of the race card. By the way, the soon-to-be ex-congresswoman doesn’t have any children, male, female, or black. A complete lack of experience about a subject has never kept Crockett from speaking with authority on it, though. 

It’s always weird and irritating when Crockett attempts to pretend to be down with the struggle in any way. She was educated at a “Country Day” school and an exclusive all-girls Catholic high school. It wasn’t exactly a mean streets upbringing. She’s also owned a law firm and been a member of Congress. Her rough edges narrative is really weak. 

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Government facing up to $5 billion bill over carbon credits, Treasury reveals

The Prime Minister has doubled down on his insistence that the government will not spend billions of dollars offshore to meet New Zealand’s climate commitments.

Treasury estimates it could cost up to $5 billion to pay for the overseas carbon credits New Zealand needs to honour its Paris Agreement commitments.

An additional $1.6 billion may also be needed to pay for credits to meet a subsequent commitment, due by 2035.

The government was “gonna do everything we can” to honour the country’s Paris Agreement pledge to halve emissions by 2030, Christopher Luxon said.

“But just reassuring everybody, we ain’t shutting down farms and we certainly aren’t sending billions of dollars offshore.”

The Green Party said it was impossible for the government to meet the target with domestic climate policies alone.

It was time for Luxon be honest about whether the government was still committed to the Paris Agreement, and – if so – to explain how it would do that, co-leader leader Chlöe Swarbrick said.

“Are we genuinely, honestly going to meet the [target], do they genuinely, honestly commit us to doing that? Because if so, the reality is we will need to pay for offshore mitigation.”

New Zealand has the option of meeting its pledge to halve net greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 entirely with domestic policies.

However, the most recent analysis from the Ministry for the Environment showed that there was a shortfall of 84 million tonnes of emissions, that would need to be made up by paying other countries to offset their emissions instead.

Treasury has identified the potential cost of offshore credits to make up the gap as a specific fiscal risk to the government’s finances for several years now.

However, it has never put an official figure on the government books, because there was “no legal obligation” to meet the target and successive governments had not committed to any purchases.

A previous one-off analysis it prepared in 2023 put the cost at anywhere from $3 billion to $24 billion.

Last year, Treasury secretary Iain Rennie gave Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick an undertaking to update that analysis.

The new estimate narrows the range to $4.4b-$5 billion to meet the 2030 pledge, and $0.2-$1.6 billion to meet New Zealand’s next pledge to lower emissions by 51-55 percent by 2035.

That was based on the Ministry for the Environment’s 2025 emissions projections, with and without extra policies to reduce emissions.

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The Business Of Homelessness

Several months ago, I wrote an opinion piece questioning Miami Beach’s homelessness policies, the City’s compliance with state law, the effectiveness of taxpayer-funded programs, and the measurable outcomes residents were receiving for millions of dollars in public spending. The article was published by Miami’s Community Newspapers. Today, that article no longer exists on its website. Readers attempting to access it are greeted with a 404 error page.

I have no interest in speculating about who made that decision or why. What interests me is the larger question: why is there such resistance to a public debate about homelessness in Miami Beach? Because the questions raised in that article have never been answered.

For months, I have asked for a real discussion about homelessness in Miami Beach. Not a press release. Not a presentation. Not carefully crafted messaging. A debate. Policy against policy. Outcome against outcome. Fact against fact. Those opportunities have never been granted.

That alone should concern every resident and taxpayer.

When government is confident in its position, it welcomes scrutiny. It does not avoid it. It does not rely on talking points. It does not ask the public to accept conclusions without examining the facts. It engages, explains, and defends its decisions in full view of the people it serves.

Instead, Miami Beach continues to celebrate low point-in-time homeless counts as proof of success. That may make for a favorable headline, but it does not necessarily mean the problem is being solved. A point-in-time count is exactly what it sounds like: a snapshot. One night. One moment. It does not measure how many people return to the streets days later. It does not measure treatment outcomes. It does not measure recidivism. It does not measure whether people are actually escaping homelessness. It measures optics.

The uncomfortable reality is that Miami Beach has built a system that explains inaction instead of delivering results.

The City’s ordinance conditions enforcement on the availability of shelter and services. In practice, that means enforcement becomes optional. No shelter available means no enforcement. No enforcement means no compliance. No compliance means the problem continues. Florida law does not provide cities with an indefinite loophole to suspend action. The State made its expectations clear. Prohibit public camping. Enforce the law. Provide structured alternatives. Use available treatment resources. Intervene when individuals are in crisis.

More importantly, the State backed those expectations with funding, treatment programs, crisis stabilization resources, Baker Act authority, Marchman Act authority, and legal tools designed to address homelessness, mental illness, and substance abuse. The authority exists. The resources exist. The question is whether local government has the will to use them.

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US Begins Another Round of Attacks on Iran

On Wednesday night, US Central Command (CENTCOM) announced it was launching another round of attacks on Iran as Iranian media began reporting blasts across the southern part of the country.

The attacks marked the second day in a row that the US launched strikes on Iran and came after President Trump threatened more bombings. US War Secretary Pete Hegseth also said that the US would be attacking the Islamic Republic.

“CENTCOM will be busy tonight because President Trump said we will be hitting Iran hard, and we will be,” Hegseth told reporters outside CENTCOM headquarters in Florida not long before the strikes started.

On Wednesday morning, the president said on Truth Social that Iran has “taken too long to negotiate a deal that would have been great for them, now they will have to pay the price.” He also claimed in the post that Iran had been “completely defeated” despite its ability to launch missile and drone attacks across the Middle East.

In comments to reporters in the Oval Office later in the day, Trump was more explicit in his threat. “We hit them hard yesterday, and we’re going to hit them again hard today,” he said.

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A DOJ Brief Preposterously Insists That Trump’s ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’ Was Politically Neutral

In a brief filed on Friday, Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr. argues that a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s brazenly corrupt “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is moot because the Justice Department does not plan to implement the idea. Woodward also notes that the lawsuit, Floyd v. Department of Justice, is based on the premise that the fund was designed to benefit Trump’s supporters, excluding Democrats who claim they were victims of Republican “lawfare and weaponization.” And that, he says, is simply not true.

Trump himself cast doubt on both of those arguments in a Meet the Press interview that aired two days after Woodward filed his brief. The president suggested that the fund, which was part of a May 18 “settlement agreement” that resolved his lawsuit against the IRS, might not be dead after all. And he described the intended beneficiaries as people who “have been hurt so badly by radical-left lunatics” who “worked for the Biden administration and Sleepy Joe.”

As the contrast between Woodward’s arguments in court and Trump’s comments on TV illustrates, the Justice Department’s portrayal of the Anti-Weaponization Fund is completely divorced from reality. Woodward’s description of the fund, which he officially approved by signing the “settlement agreement,” glides over the reasons why it provoked the bipartisan backlash that persuaded Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to ditch the idea two weeks after announcing it.

The pretext for the Anti-Weaponization Fund was a lawsuit in which Trump preposterously claimed that IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn’s illegal leaking of his tax returns had caused “at least” $10 billion in damages. In addition to offering an improbable estimate of the injury he had suffered, Trump missed the statutory deadline for filing such claims. And even if he had filed his lawsuit on time, he would have faced the challenge of showing that the IRS was responsible for the crimes of a man it did not employ.

Despite those legal weaknesses, the Justice Department never mounted a defense. That failure underlined the blatant conflicts of interest created by the lawsuit, which pitted Trump against agencies he oversees in a case where both sides were represented by attorneys who work for him. The situation was so bizarre that Kathleen Williams, the federal judge overseeing the case in the Southern District of Florida, questioned whether it involved a genuine controversy between adverse parties, as required for the lawsuit to proceed.

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The White House’s AI Deal: Kill State Laws, Demand Your ID

The White House is dangling something the technology industry has wanted for years: a federal block on state AI laws and the price is a national age verification push that chips away at anonymous internet use.

The administration is negotiating a federal preemption of state AI laws in exchange for its support of key tech policy priorities from the Hill, according to Axios, and the bills it would back include the Kids Online Safety Act, the NO FAKES Act, and age verification requirements.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) is steering the talks. “Senator Blackburn is spearheading the negotiation with the White House to finalize legislative text of an AI preemption package that includes protections for kids, creators, and communities through the Senate version of KOSA, the NO FAKES Act, and age verification requirements,” a Blackburn spokesperson said.

The administration kept its own language vague. “The White House continues to proactively engage across government and industry,” a White House official said.

Strip away the framing and the age verification piece asks something concrete of you. To prove you are old enough, you upload a government ID, submit to a face scan, or let a service study your behavior closely enough to guess your age. None of those confirms age and nothing else. They confirm identity and they leave a record that outlives the check.

The internet that once let you be a username starts to demand your legal name, your face, or your documents.

The bigger trade sits underneath the child-safety language. States have been writing their own AI rules, some addressing how companies collect biometric data and automate decisions about residents.

Preemption would freeze that, removing one of the few places people have to push back on how these systems handle their data.

The maneuvering also signals which bill is fading. A bipartisan proposal from Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) and Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) isn’t the likely vehicle for AI policy in this Congress. That bill would preempt state AI laws for three years and require certain developers to address risks before releasing models.

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Why Do US Media Still Treat ADL as a Credible Source on Antisemitism?

More than a decade ago, a video (Mondoweiss, 8/7/14) showed Jodi Rudoren, then the New York Times‘ Jerusalem bureau chief, having a casual and friendly meeting with Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League. The cozy relationship in the video was telling enough, but when the video captured Foxman complaining that the “Arabs” had taken over a famous New York City hotel, and Rudoren shrugging it off, many skeptics viewed this as a window into the Times’ pro-Israel bias.

The recently deceased Foxman (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 5/12/26), famous for promoting the pro-Israel viewpoint and insinuating that critics of Israel were antisemitic, wasn’t Rudoren’s source in this video; they were pals.

Emmaia Gelman’s new book, The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, is a history of the group, framing it not as a racial justice organization but as a deputy sheriff for the US empire. Gelman shows how the ADL crafts a narrative for the public that pushes Western imperialism rather than equality. In recent years, the ADL’s main focus has been smearing criticism of Israel or support for Palestinian human rights as Jew hatred. As the group (4/4/23) says, “anti-Zionism is indeed antisemitism.”

The book is loosely part of the #DropTheADL campaign, which encourages both progressives and schools to stop citing the group as a source on political extremism, because of its “racist and right-wing” track record. The movement has had limited success: The delegates of the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, voted to sever ties with the ADL, a move that was overruled by the union’s governing board (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 7/21/25).

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