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.

Homeowners Face Eminent Domain Bulldozers As Data Centers Demand Ever More Power

Georgia Power isn’t negotiating anymore. The Southern Company subsidiary is seizing dozens of homes and hundreds of easements across Coweta and Fayette counties to ram through a 35-mile, 500-kilovolt transmission line that will feed at least four massive AI data centers. Project Wansley is just the latest flashpoint in a backlash that has been building for months.

At least 20 to 30 homes face outright demolition. Another 300-plus properties will get permanent easements for towers planted in backyards and next to pools.

But residents like Ansley Brown are fighting back. Her mother bought their family home in 2003 through a USDA rural development loan for single mothers. Now the utility wants the property for the corridor. Brown’s viral TikTok exposing the lowball offers (she says $70,000 to $100,000 below market) has racked up millions of views and drawn state lawmakers into the fight. 

Georgia Power says the line is essential.

The company is racing to add roughly 10 gigawatts of new generating capacity over the next five years, with executives openly stating that  about 80% of that power will go to data centers. Meanwhile, transmission has become the bottleneck, and utilities are turning to eminent domain to clear the path.

This isn’t happening in isolation. We’ve been pounding the table on data center resistance, from Northern Virginia counties rejecting new substations to Texas communities suing over water drawdowns and power rate spikes. The pattern is the same: hyperscale demand collides with local infrastructure limits, and the costs get socialized while the profits stay private.

Electricity prices are already feeling the pressure. Utilities across the Southeast and Midwest have warned of double-digit residential rate hikes tied directly to data center load growth. Georgia Power’s own filings show residential customers absorbing a growing share of the bill for transmission and generation built primarily for big tech. 

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Ken Paxton’s office offered a child molester ONE day in jail and NO sex offender registration. Donald Trump endorsed Paxton yesterday.

Adam Hoffman, a 49-year-old Waco attorney, was facing life without parole for the continuous sexual abuse of a young boy. Ken Paxton’s office took the case, sat on it for nearly three years and then offered him a deal to plead guilty to two misdemeanors and serve one day in jail.

That deal was signed off on by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas, Ken Paxton, the man Donald Trump endorsed and called a “true MAGA Warrior”.

Adam Hoffman was originally indicted on first-degree felony continuous sexual abuse of a young child. In Texas, that charge carries a minimum sentence of 25 years and a maximum of life without parole

Hoffman’s first trial ended in June 2025 with a hung jury, seven to five in favor of guilty. The judge declared a mistrial and the case was set for retrial.

The local district attorney in McLennan County had already recused himself, because Hoffman was a fellow Waco lawyer and a member of the same legal community. The case had been handed off to the Texas Attorney General’s office in 2023. By the time of the retrial, Paxton’s office had been running it for two and a half years.

Instead of retrying the case, the Texas Attorney General’s office offered Hoffman a plea deal.

Hoffman would plead guilty to two Class A misdemeanors: indecent assault and displaying harmful material to a minor. He would serve a total of ONE DAY in jail. He would NOT be required to register as a sex offender. His Texas law license would be suspended, but not for life. After 5 years he could reapply for it.

One day in jail, no sex offender registry AND be eligible to practice law again by 2031.

That is the deal the Ken Paxton’s office offered a man who admitted in court to molesting a child.

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Ontario man dies of MAID after being assessed outside Tim Hortons

A London, Ont., doctor who assessed a patient with inflammatory bowel disease and a history of mental health issues for MAID outside a Tim Hortons location and later personally drove the man to the place his life was ended has agreed to a minimum six months’ supervision.

In another case, Dr. James MacLean failed to administer one of three drugs used in assisted deaths — one that paralyzes the body’s muscles, including the muscles involved in breathing. The patient resumed spontaneously breathing again after initially being pronounced dead, and after MacLean had already left the home.

As first reported Monday by the The Globe and Mail, the doctor’s case is raising new concerns about MAID’s oversight and accountability.

“What is striking is not only the seriousness of the concerns identified in these cases, but the limited regulatory response,” said Dr. Ramona Coelho, a family physician and former member of the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario’s MAID death review committee.

As part of an investigation by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) into two public complaints made against MacLean, an independent assessor appointed to review a number of MacLean’s charts concluded that he “did not meet the standard of practice of the profession, displayed a lack of judgment and that his conduct exposes or is likely to expose patients to harm or injury in five out of twenty charts reviewed,” according to a summary decision of the college’s inquiries, complaints and reports committee.

MacLean was called before the committee to be verbally “cautioned” with respect to the MAID complaints.

In addition to agreeing to mandatory clinical supervision for at least six months as part of an “undertaking” with the college, MacLean will undergo ongoing review of his MAID patient charts and mandatory professional education related to MAID, consent, documentation, professional boundaries and professional behaviour.

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Defending The Fourth Amendment To Protect Gun Owners

All gun owners fully understand the vital importance of preserving the Second Amendment. But right behind that Constitutional Amendment in importance is the need to uphold the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.

After all, without robust Fourth Amendment rights, we will never have much of a Second Amendment right. For that reason, both Gun Owners of America and Gun Owners Foundation have regularly filed amicus briefs to guard against erosion of Fourth Amendment rights. We recently filed such an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the High Court to ensure that law enforcement not abuse the investigative technique known as “knock and talk.”

As more and more states seek to ban more and more classes of previously legal firearms, gun confiscation has become an ever-greater threat. Historically, the Fourth Amendment’s protections have been greatest when applied to the home, which also happens to be where most guns are kept. The Supreme Court has discussed the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.

However, the courts have recognized that police have the right to “knock” on the door of your home, and “talk” to you – if you agree to speak. In Florida v. Jardines, 569 U.S. 1 (2013), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that all visitors – including the police – have an “implicit license” to “[i] approach the home by the front path, [ii] knock promptly, [iii] wait briefly to be received, and then (absent invitation to linger longer) [iv] leave.” That rule seems entirely reasonable – but it is astonishing how police have come to abuse that “implicit license.”

In a recently decided case from North Carolina, State v. Reel, 297 N.C. App. 205 (N.C. Ct. App. 2024), the police broke every one of the rules, but the search was upheld. The officers suspected drug dealing was going on at a house, so they parked on a side street and crossed the defendant’s side yard – not the front yard. They followed a visitor to the front door, and when the defendant opened the door for the visitor, tried to force their way in behind her. The police never actually knocked. And, they never actually talked – except to demand the door be opened so they could rush in, claiming to have smelled marijuana. When the defendant refused and shut the door, another officer kicked in the door, searching for and seizing drugs. Thus, “knock and talk” was used as a pretext to conduct a warrantless search and seizure in a home. Nevertheless, North Carolina’s two highest courts approved.

GOA’s amicus brief urged the U.S. Supreme Court to impose a “bright-line” rule for law enforcement, so officers would know their limits, and judges would have a clear rule to enforce. We argue that since the “implied license” was based on the fact that any visitor – such as trick-or-treaters or girl scouts – to a house could “knock and talk,” the police could do the same. So we took that justification and suggested it be made the rule – a clear limitation on what the police could do. We proposed the rule to be:

The right of a police officer to conduct a “knock-and-talk” is no greater than a Girl Scout has to approach a house to sell cookies.

Since a Girl Scout cannot walk around your house to the back yard to the back door, neither can the police. Since a Girl Scout cannot come to your house in the middle of the night, neither can uninvited police. No peering through windows. No forcible entry. No hanging around without invitation from the occupant. No repeated trips back to harass the occupant. No surveillance devices. And, the occupant must have the right to refuse to talk, and to revoke the “implied license” for the police to remain and talk whenever he chooses.

The police have a tough enough job. Fuzzy rules of procedure not only jeopardizes the peoples’ liberties, but also law enforcement safety.

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NYC Mayor Mamdani’s Housing Plan Sparks Property-Rights Alarm Over Forced Transfers To Nonprofits

NYC socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani released “Block by Block: The Housing Plan for a New Era,” which presents a sweeping, deeply troubling blueprint to tackle the metro area’s deepening housing crisis.

Mamdani told the crowd:

When necessary, we will take aggressive legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers. And for buildings that have suffered chronic neglect, we work to transfer ownership to responsible stewards. Stewards include community land trusts, nonprofits, or even the tenants themselves.

X user Difficult Froyo outlined what he described as the obvious playbook by the socialist mayor:

Rent control so landlords cannot raise rent to properly maintain the property. NYC takes the property and gives it to his political friends that donate to him. This is all going to be a theft scheme.

Another X user asked:

“Insane. If this isn’t communism, I don’t know what is. Has America really reached the point of communism?”

Mamdani’s backdoor property-seizure strategy will likely spook lenders, insurers, and small landlords. That’s because it caps landlord income, allows residential buildings to become distressed, then uses the city’s enforcement to push properties into nonprofit, community land trust, or tenant ownership.

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The Republican Party Is Nothing More Than a Cult of Trump

The Republican Party is dead. Long live the party of Trump, which wears the GOP like a skin suit.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump took down libertarian-leaning Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), to whom he’d taken such a profound dislike that he backed a primary challenger in the form of MAGA stalwart Ed Gallrein. Massie was highly ranked for his voting record by conservative organizations, but so were other candidates Trump pushed out of office—and out of the party. In truth, it’s been years since the Republican Party was a conservative organization; these days it’s a cult of personality around the president.

“Tom Massie of Kentucky, the worst and most unreliable Republican Congressman in the history of our Country, is an even bigger insult to our Nation than Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana,” President Trump snarked on May 17. That was the day Cassidy lost his state’s Republican Senate primary to Trump-backed challenger Rep. Julia Letlow and State Treasurer John Fleming, who now head to a runoff.

By that point, Trump-backed primary challengers had already turned out five Republican Indiana state senators who resisted the president’s drive to gerrymander congressional districts to gain advantage in this year’s midterm congressional elections.

“Good luck to those Great Indiana Senate Candidates who are running against people who couldn’t care less about our Country, or about keeping the Majority in Congress,” the president posted on Truth Social prior to release of the Indiana results. “There are eight Great Patriots running against long seated RINOS — Let’s see how those RINOS do tonight!”

Massie in turn lost this week to Gallrein, who was backed 54.8 percent to 45.2 percent by Republican primary voters responding to the president’s call. Massie had won 99.6 percent of the general election vote in his district in 2024, 65 percent in 2022, and 67 percent in 2020, according to BallotPedia. He was popular until dismissed by Trump, who won 64.5 percent of Kentucky votes in 2024.

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The Left Seems to be Waking Up to Racist Gun Control Laws

What does one’s race have to do with one’s right to keep and bear arms? Well, nothing. The Second Amendment covers all American citizens and legal immigrants. Asking race is, at most, an identifier to help differentiate a black John Smith from a white one, and that’s about it.

Unfortunately for us all, that wasn’t how many people viewed it back in the day. They thought anyone who wasn’t white was someone who needed to be disarmed. Whether it was because they didn’t want to be overthrown or they just thought non-whites (and Catholics, for some reason) were particularly dangerous isn’t relevant. The truth was, they did.

Luckily, we’re more enlightened these days, right?

Not really.

We’ve talked a fair bit about the issues in New Jersey, particularly with racial disparity in permit issuance. Our own John Petrolino, who unfortunately lives there, has done a lot of work bringing this issue to light.

But let’s be real here. None of the people who need to be outraged are probably reading pro-gun sits like Bearing Arms. They’re reading Slate, and what are the odds of Slate covering this?

Well, better than I thought they were. Aymann Ismail’s firsthand account of the exhausting process of becoming a New Jersey gun owner may be eye-opening to the website’s more progressive readers. 

So in 2020, I applied for a Firearm Purchaser Identification, a permit to purchase a firearm that is required in New Jersey. After fingerprints, references, application fees, and months of waiting, I was told over the phone that I had no choice but to withdraw my application. The issue was a misdemeanor trespassing charge in New York from my street-photographer days. Under New Jersey law, that should not have disqualified me from owning a gun. I had never been convicted of a felony. No domestic violence charges. No mental health issues. It didn’t matter. The Newark Police Department’s firearm permitting office told me my application was being withdrawn. They insisted they were doing me a favor, and that a denial would bar me from reapplying if I got my record expunged.

Again, I wasn’t even sure I wanted a gun. But the interaction was curious. It didn’t matter that I pointed out I met the legal requirements. Again and again, I was unsuccessful. It had me thinking about who is presumed “safe” to own a gun, and who isn’t. I began speaking with Black and brown gun owners across northern New Jersey, particularly in cities where violence, policing, and race overlap in complicated ways. An Afro-Cuban neighborhood friend I went to high school with in Newark told me he had applied for his own permit and received it in just two weeks. When I explained that I tried multiple times and was still waiting months after my latest application, he looked genuinely confused. Then he asked what race I’d listed on the paperwork. “Other,” I told him. He burst out laughing. “You idiot,” he said. “You’re supposed to put white.”

The more people I spoke to, the more I learned I was far from alone in making that “mistake.” The greater question of who gets to, and should, own a gun turned out to far more complicated than I knew. Few people—on the left or the right—want to talk about it. The ending of my own story helps explain why.

Oh, on this side of the right, we’re more than willing to talk about it. It’s just that no one on the left seems interested in listening.

Now, the author did, finally, get his license and didn’t have to lie about his race on his application, which is good news, but the fact that New Jersey did that in the first place is a major issue. It’s one that does need to be talked about because it clearly illustrates the bright string from the racist gun laws of the old days, and how little has changed.

Here in Georgia, many of our now dead gun control laws could be similarly linked. The prohibition of carrying a firearm at a “public gathering” was a reaction to armed black men and women responding to a violent attack that’s now called the Camilla Massacre. It wasn’t the shooting itself, but the fact that marchers, after being attacked, went home and got their own guns to fight back.

So it’s unsurprising that New Jersey didn’t have a law in place forbidding black gun ownership or concealed carry, but the application wasn’t much different than if they did.

It’s why subjective gun laws are always going to be an issue, and largely an issue for minorities. It’s part of why Bruen stuck them down. Anything that can be misused to cause harm to a particular group–any particular group–will be used or misused to cause harm to some group or another for no reason other than the people impacted are part of that group.

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Boston Public Library to host 19 drag queen story hours for children at branches across the city as part of June Pride Month programming

Mayor Michelle Wu‘s Boston is rolling out the red carpet for tots — with the city’s public library system scheduling 19 drag queen story hours for children at branches across the city in June, as the New Boston Post first reported.

The taxpayer-funded Boston Public Library has booked three performers — Ms. Patty, Just JP, and Rose Quartz — to read picture books and sing songs to kids and families, with Ms. Patty alone headlining an eight-show tour of branches from the West End to Dorchester.

The library is pitching the sessions as a way to “raise awareness of gender diversity” and “build empathy” — buzzwords that have triggered parental-rights groups, religious leaders, and Republicans nationwide, who say drag shows have no business doubling as children’s programming.

Ms. Patty, who is booked for eight Boston Public Library drag story hour sessions across the branches in June.

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San Francisco YMCA bans nudity after trans member exposes himself to women, children

A San Francisco YMCA has implemented new rules after a trans-identified male was seen walking around naked in the locker room in front of women and children, as well as allegedly harassing female members.

New rules at the Stonestown Family YMCA stated that “Nudity should be discreet, limited, and brief.” The rule added, “Nudity is permitted only while actively showering. Members are expected to put clothing on or be covered during use of the space outside of showering,” per the Daily Mail.

The new rules continued, “Respect privacy and personal space. Please maintain appropriate distance from others, be mindful of personal space during times of undress, and demonstrate courtesy at all times.” 

Also among the new rules are that hair dryers should be used “for drying head hair only,” and that children five and younger need to be accompanied by a parent or guardian while using changing rooms for the opposite sex. 

The new rules come after a series of complaints by female YMCA attendees against Sammy, a trans-identified male. Sammy, who had been a regular at the gym since 2024, has reportedly not been seen at the location since the new rules went into effect. 

Elizabeth Kenney, a member of the Berkeley YMCA location that Sammy also attends, recalled to the outlet seeing the male “harassing” an elderly member who had asked him to cover up. The male allegedly told the elderly woman, “If you don’t like the way I look, then you’ve got a sexual problem with yourself.” 

Kenney recalled telling Sammy, “Get away from her, leave her alone. You’re a man, you’d don’t belong here.” Sammy had also been caught on camera by Kenney’s husband, Travis, claiming to a YMCA staffer that a “drunk” woman had been lecturing him. 

Anne, who attends the Stonestown YMCA location, filed a police report in March accusing Sammy of harassment. She said that after blow drying himself while naked, Sammy had walked up to her “very close,” turned around, and used a handheld mirror to stare back at her. 

Anne wrote in the police report, “He used it as if it were a rear-view mirror to look at me behind himself. His eyes caught mine in the mirror and I froze.” She also claimed that Sammy had “paraded” around in front of Anne’s two young children in the locker room.

Elizabeth, another YMCA member, told the outlet that she had felt “repulsed and angry” to see the male “blow drying his entire naked body, including his penis, posed in front of all of the other women.”

Despite the new rules, the YMCA restated that California law allows for people to use the locker room of their self-declared gender identity.

Susan Pete, a 59-year-old member of the YMCA who was a vocal critic of Sammy, told the outlet she hopes he’s gone for good. “The transgender people ruined everything for women. They ruined sports, ruined the locker room, they upset me,” she said. “We’ve been very happy since he’s been gone, but I don’t know if he’s going to come back and cover up, or fight against it. Hopefully he just went to Seattle.”

She also raised concerns about the new rules being impractical. “So what are they going to do – having someone standing around monitoring the situation, saying ‘you’ve been naked too long?’ He’s ruined everything.”

Women Are Real, a Bay Area group defending women’s spaces, wrote in response to the rule changes, “We’ve been working to remove this guy from the women’s locker room for 2 years. He was literally there almost every day for HOURS. It’s a super tiny locker room and he spent hours in it.” 

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US Law Enforcement Warns of ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ as AI Hatred Grows

In the wake of attacks on CEOs, a nationwide protest movement targeting data centers, and increasing concerns about AI job replacement, federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists.

More than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fusion centers obtained by WIRED show a national shift taking place to surveil this new and worryingly broad category of people and activities deemed an emerging threat.

This new effort follows President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and “anti-capitalism” beliefs. Earlier this month, Trump’s counterterrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, released a public counterterrorism strategy claiming that left-wing extremists are one of the three top counterterrorism priorities facing the United States.

Taken together, these Trump administration directives have commandeered the domestic surveillance apparatus to surveil and criminalize speech and assembly that challenges the ideology of the White House. A new focus on anti-technology extremism adds an unreported category to already public designations under a presidency that has heavily invested political and material capital in AI and data center proliferation.

Among the documents in the tranche obtained by WIRED is a New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau report that warns of widespread upheaval in response to AI adoption. Of particular note is a novel term for what the bureau purports to be an emerging extremism threat.

“The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City,” the report reads. The term “anti-tech violent extremism” does not appear in any publicly available DHS or FBI domestic extremism reports or guides and represents a novel grouping of a wide range of ideologies under a single extremist category.

In the same Intelligence Bureau assessment, analysts also describe a novel threat emerging in the wake of the arrest and trial of Ziz Laota, an extreme rationalist who allegedly led a small cultlike group, three members of which have been charged with murder, tied to an obsessive ideology focused on the existential risk posed by AI.

While the Zizian ideology is extremist in nature, a less extreme version of the same fears surrounding the cataclysmic potential of AI are a common concern among AI alignment experts, machine learning engineers, and even frontier AI companies. Nonetheless, the Intelligence Bureau warns that “paranoid views regarding AI” may proliferate in the aftermath of the Zizians’ trial, thanks to their “attempt to reason the belief that a godlike incarnation of AI is imminent,” and belief that “humans must best use their time in the present to devote themselves to ensuring its compliance with human morality, or face existential consequences for failing to do so.”

The NYPD intel assessment follows the department’s collaboration with the FBI last year to monitor the Signal chat of an activist group coordinating volunteers to monitor public hearings at immigration courts in New York. According to documents obtained by The Guardian, the FBI surveilled activists as part of a broader investigation into “anarchist violent extremist actors,” one of the threat categories named in the new counter terrorism strategy.

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