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.

Gerald R. Ford out of commission for one year: What’s wrong with America’s most advanced carrier?

The nuclear-powered USS Gerald R. Ford, the most advanced aircraft carrier in the United States Navy and the only vessel in its class, is presently anchored in Croatia’s port of Split for repairs ‌and maintenance. Media reports have indicated the ship is there to stay, since repairs after a major “laundry fire” and prolonged deployment could take between 12 and 14 months.

Delivered years behind schedule in May 2017, the Ford was by far the most expensive American warship ever constructed, costing $13.2 billion. The latest prolonged deployment of the ship began on June 24 and included combat operations during the US raid on Venezuela to kidnap President Nicolas Maduro, as well as in the ongoing US-Israeli attack on Iran.

The supercarrier ended up hastily withdrawn from the Middle East theater in mid-March, having suffered a supposedly non-combat-related fire. The ship briefly moored at Crete for damage assessment before heading to Croatia for maintenance. 

Laundry fire?

The deployment exceeded 260 days and ranks as one of the longest carrier patrols since the Vietnam War, ending on March 12 shortly after the ship transited the Suez Canal and entered the Red Sea. According to official statements from US Central Command, it was then that the vessel “experienced a fire that originated in the ship’s main laundry spaces.”  

“The cause of the fire was not combat-related and is contained. There is no damage to the ship’s propulsion plant, and the aircraft carrier remains fully operational. Two sailors are currently receiving medical treatment for non-life-threatening injuries and are in stable condition,” CENTCOM stated at the time.

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How Israel and the FBI manipulated assassination plots to goad Trump into Iran war

The FBI manufactured plots to convince Trump that Iran sought to kill him, while Israel and its administration allies exploited the president’s deepest fears to keep him on the war path.

“I got him before he got me,” an ebullient President Donald Trump remarked to a reporter when asked about his motives for authorizing the killing of Iran’s Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on February 28, 2026.

With his off-the-cuff remark, Trump revealed that anxiety about his own assassination at the hands of Iranian agents influenced his decision to initiate a US-Israeli regime change war that has already resulted in American casualties, the bombings of schools and hospitals inside Iran, devastating Iranian retaliatory strikes on US military bases and embassies, and a spiraling global economic crisis.

Trump’s generalized fears of assassination were well-founded. He was nearly killed in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024 by a 20-year-old engineering student named Thomas Crooks who managed to fire eight rounds at the former president from a rooftop, slicing his ear and missing his head by a hair’s breadth. Two months later, a drifter named Ryan Routh was arrested after hiding for hours in the shrubbery outside the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach, Florida. Routh had been spotted after pointing an assault rifle toward a Secret Service agent as Trump played golf 400 yards away. 

Officials have yet to produce any evidence that Iran played a role in either of these attempts on Trump’s life. Yet since those fateful events, Israel-aligned Trump advisors, Israeli intelligence, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself have gone to extreme lengths in order to tie Tehran to the plots. More shocking still is the fact that the FBI has manufactured a series of assassination plots, successfully convincing Trump that Iran was hunting him on US soil with highly sophisticated teams of hit men.

The man accused of leading the most significant of these operations, Asif Merchant, is currently on trial in a Brooklyn, NY federal court. After the US granted him a visa despite his presence on a terror watchlist, Merchant was in the constant company of an FBI confidential informant who ultimately steered the contrived plot to its conclusion. He never stood a chance of realizing his plans, and did not appear serious about doing so.

Independent journalist Ken Silva puts it succinctly in his forthcoming investigative book, “The Trump Assassination Plots”: “A closer look at the Merchant case reveals that at the very least…it was a highly controlled FBI sting operation that never posed a threat to Trump. More nefariously, records and whistleblower disclosures indicate that Merchant may have been the patsy in a case totally fabricated by the undercover agents.”

Authorities arrested Merchant on July 12, 2024 – just one day before Crooks attempted to kill Trump in Butler. Hours after the failed Butler assassination, FBI agents interrogated Merchant about whether it was in fact Iran that had Crooks under its control. 

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FDA Grants Speedy Approval to Eli Lilly’s Weight-Loss Pill for Obesity

Federal regulators on Wednesday approved Eli Lilly’s new weight-loss pill, a second daily oral medication to treat obesity and other weight-related conditions.

The Food and Drug Administration granted expedited approval to orforglipron, a GLP-1 drug that works like widely used injectable medications to mimic a natural hormone that controls appetite and feelings of fullness.

The drug, which will be branded as Foundayo, is expected to begin shipping Monday. The company said people with insurance may be able to get the drug starting at $25 per month with a Lilly discount card. Prices for people paying cash will range between $149 per month to $349 per month, depending on the dose.

The new pill joins drugmaker Novo Nordisk’s oral Wegovy pill, which has spurred more than 600,000 prescriptions in the United States since it was approved in December.

The FDA authorized Eli Lilly’s drug as part of a new program aimed at cutting drug approval times. The agency said it reviewed the company’s application in 50 days.

In a clinical trial of more than 3,000 adults with obesity, participants who received the highest dose of orforglipron, 36 milligrams, lost 11.2% of their body weight — about 25 pounds on average — over more than 16 months. That compared with a 2.1% weight loss, or less than 5 pounds, in patients who received a placebo, or dummy pill, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.

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NASA Astronaut SHUTS DOWN Race-Baiting Reporter With EPIC Reality Check Ahead of Historic Moon Mission

NASA astronaut Victor Glover refused to play along with the identity-obsessed framing pushed by reporters ahead of America’s next mission to the Moon.

The Artemis II mission is currently in flight, having successfully launched on Wednesday.

On Thursday evening, the crew successfully completed the Translunar Injection (TLI) burn. This five-minute, 50-second engine firing accelerated the spacecraft to break free of Earth’s orbit.

According to NASA, the spacecraft is on course for its lunar flyby on April 6, where it will loop around the far side of the Moon.

The mission is led by a veteran crew of four:

  • Reid Wiseman (Commander)
  • Victor Glover (Pilot)
  • Christina Koch (Mission Specialist)
  • Jeremy Hansen (Mission Specialist)

Victor Glover, the U.S. Navy captain and NASA pilot, is making headlines not just for his historic role but for what he refuses to turn it into.

During an exchange ahead of the launch from the Kennedy Space Center, Glover was asked what it means to be the “first Black man” to visit the Moon.

Glover didn’t take the bait. He didn’t lean into the identity politics that have been rotting our institutions from the inside out. Instead, he reminded everyone that space exploration isn’t about the color of your skin, it’s about the spirit of the human race.

Glover:
“It is a big question, and I want to highlight, I guess, maybe one facet of this—the tension, I call it. I live in this dichotomy between happiness that a young woman can look at Christina and just physicalize her passion or her interests, or even if it’s not something she wants to do, she can just be like, “girl power,” and that’s awesome.

And that young brown boys and girls can look at me and go, “Hey, he looks like me—and he’s doing what?” And that’s great. I love that.

But I also hope we are pushing the other direction—that one day we don’t have to talk about these “firsts,” that one day this is just—and listen to this—that this is human history. It’s about human history. It’s the story of humanity, not Black history, not women’s history, but that it becomes human history.”

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Massachusetts Agrees to Delete Data From App It ‘Secretly Installed’ During Pandemic

Massachusetts officials have agreed to delete data from a contact tracing application that people said was installed on their phones without their permission during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Under a settlement agreement approved by a federal judge on March 31, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health “shall (a) destroy any Primary Data in the Department’s possession, custody, and control, which the Department, exercising all due diligence, has located and … that was made available to the Department from the COVID Exposure Notification Setting on Android Devices; and (b) certify in writing to Class Counsel that such data has been destroyed and will not be provided to any third party.”

The state’s health commissioner also promised not to have data collecting applications installed on people’s phones without their permission for five years.

The settlement came in a case brought by plaintiffs who said the app in question, known as MassNotify v.3 or Exposure Notification Settings Feature-MA, was “secretly installed” on their phones without their permission.

American Institute of Economic Research senior fellow Robert Wright, who lives in Massachusetts, said the app was downloaded onto his Android phone around July 1, 2021, without his knowledge. Johnny Kula, a New Hampshire resident who travels to Massachusetts on a daily basis for work, also said he discovered the app on his phone around the same time, and that it was back on the phone later in 2021 after he uninstalled it.

The plaintiffs’ claims echoed reviews from app store users complaining they had not downloaded the app, but it appeared on their phones. The app, which allowed people to say they had tested positive for COVID-19, and alerted others who had recently been close in location to those people, was downloaded more than one million times, according to court filings. Similar applications were developed by at least 24 other states.

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Don Lemon Teases His Presidential Run Depends on God, Who He Insists is Female: ‘If She Gives Me a Sign’

Former CNN anchor and independent journalist Don Lemon’s time away from network television has exacerbated his own delusions: he could not manage a news show for CNN but now believes becoming president is possible.

Before doing that, though, he would need a sign from his god who is apparently a woman.

Lemon made an appearance on “Pod Save America” alongside host Alex Wagner where he, unsurprisingly, couldn’t help but talk about President Donald Trump, leading Lemon to opine about his own presidential aspirations.

“Do I ever think about it, yes. Could it happen?” Lemon asked. “Yeah, it could happen. If the opportunity presented itself.”

“I know people are going to think I’m crazy, this is going to be the headline, people are going to laugh about it, I think I could be president of the United States. I could definitely run this country better than Donald Trump.”

The shock of no one, Lemon, claims to be an independent, and says he would run as a Democrat.

“Am I at that point now? No, and I know people are going to say, ‘Don Lemon is crazy’ but yeah look, why can’t I think about running for office,” Lemon said.

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Drugs, sexual blackmail: shocking confession letter exposes Israel’s Red Crescent spy ring

A bombshell confession letter obtained by The Grayzone reveals Israeli intelligence recruited an asset in the Palestinian Red Crescent, who admitted using drugs and sexual blackmail to create a “network of informants” which could infiltrate and destroy resistance groups.

A leaked confession indicates the Red Crescent was infiltrated by Israeli intelligence, which exploited its collaborator network within the Occupied Palestinian Territories to engage in criminal activity including drug trafficking, shocking acts of sexual blackmail, and political executions. 

The document was obtained by The Grayzone, which verified its authenticity through two West Bank sources with knowledge of the case. Originally published by the State of Palestine Public Prosecution, the letter shines a light on the inner workings of Tel Aviv’s espionage network inside the West Bank, revealing how resistance groups are infiltrated and monitored, while common Palestinians are press-ganged into serving the apartheid state.

The confession traces the story of a longstanding Palestinian collaborator within the Red Crescent who was originally recruited by Israel in December 2004, following “security incidents” across the West Bank during the height of the Second Intifada.

At this time, the Palestinian visited an Israeli “field interrogation center” established near their home. Struggling financially as the primary breadwinner in a fatherless family, they were considered an ideal recruit by Israel’s intelligence services. The Grayzone has omitted the identities of the Palestinians named in the confession letter.

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This company used to make weapons for the Nazis. Now it will do the same for Israel

One of Germany’s biggest and most iconic car manufacturers, Volkswagen (VW) and one of Israel’s most well-known arms manufacturers, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, part of the global Rafael Group, are planning to collaborate. If the project is realized, VW will convert one of its German factories in the historic city of Osnabrueck from making automobiles to producing components of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.

There are good reasons why this has raised eyebrows. For one thing, it reflects not only VW’s growing problems, but those of Germany’s vital automobile sector and the German economy as a whole. As the Financial Times has noted, the VW-Rafael project would mark “the highest-profile example yet of the German car industry, where profits have plunged,” trying to save itself by entering the “booming defense sector.”

These plunging profits are due to many factors: Chinese competition; Germany’s failure to keep up with cutting-edge technology, communication infrastructure, and business practices; American sabotage by tariff warfare and filching German companies via subsidies; and last but not least, the horrendous energy costs that the entire EU has inflicted on itself by going to war – by Ukrainian proxy and sanctions – against Russia.

The shift to making things for the military, meanwhile, is just a small part of Germany’s breathtakingly misguided response: Namely, a policy of going into massive public debt – under a so-called conservative – to finance a bizarre form of military Keynesianism that is based on illusions (no, Russia is not about to attack), produces self-reinforcing Russophobia (which makes a return to normality even harder), and won’t work as an economic boost, as even the usually government-aligned Spiegel has admitted.

In short, like a prism, the Osnabrueck plan bundles together many of Germany’s worst – and self-inflicted – problems, and the single silliest idea of how to tackle them.

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Another US plane hit by Iran after jet shot down & two Black Hawks also damaged as race to find missing pilot continues

Another US plane hit by Iran after jet shot down & two Black Hawks also damaged as race to find missing pilot continues

TWO Black Hawk helicopters involved in rescuing one of the two F-15 pilots were pounded by small arms fire as they transported the stricken serviceman.

It comes as the frantic race to find the second missing crew member continues after the US fighter jet was struck down over Iran.

A second American aircraft was also shot down during combat operations around the same time near the Strait of Hormuz, the Washington Post reported.

The lone pilot of the A-10 attack plane, known as Warthog, navigated it to Kuwaiti airspace before ejecting and was subsequently rescued, three US officials said.

Meanwhile, Iranian state TV claimed that “an American A-10 aircraft was shot by the defence systems of the Army Air Defence Force and crashed in the Persian Gulf in southern Iran.”

It is unclear if this is the same Warthog, or another targeted during the rescue mission for the stranded pilots.

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Eric Swalwell Threatens FBI Agents Amid Fang Fang Drama After Bondi’s Firing

Democrat Rep. Eric Swalwell on Friday threatened FBI agents during an appearance on CNN on Friday.

Swalwell ran to CNN to discuss Trump’s decision to fire Pam Bondi as Attorney General.

The Democrat lawmaker who is currently running for governor of California claimed FBI agents are being asked to break the law every single day.

“To the FBI agents who are being asked to break the law every single day. What we want to make clear, and I know this comes from Jamie Raskin and Robert Garcia, who will have the subpoena power next Congress,” Swalwell said without offering any proof whatsoever.

He continued, “You will be protected if you come forward right now.”

“If you do not come forward right now and you enable more corruption on Epstein or the weaponization, you will be before Congress, and it will all come out,” Swalwell said.

Even CNN was skeptical.

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