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.

Boston Is Paying Illegal Aliens to Become Community Organizers

Boston is offering immigrants—including people in the country illegally—$575 to complete a city-sponsored course in community organizing and advocacy.

The eligibility language on Boston’s own website is explicit:

“Interested applicants are encouraged to apply regardless of their immigration status.”

Run through Mayor Michelle Wu’s Office for Immigrant Advancement, Immigrants Lead Boston teaches participants how to organize their communities, engage government officials and advocate for change. Its fall 2026 course runs from September 21 through December 5.

Boston calls the $575 completion payment a scholarship to make participation more accessible.

Participants must attend the sessions and complete outside civic activities. The city also promises introductions to key officials.

The published rules establish that undocumented immigrants can apply. They do not disclose how many have received payments.

The program’s political ambitions become clearer in a published profile of its approach, which describes teaching the “art of politics.”

Its power-analysis instruction includes:

“Networking with people in positions of power for community advancement.”

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UN adds 61 firms to settlements blacklist over alleged human rights violations against Palestinians

The UN human rights office has added 61 more companies to a blacklist of firms that it says are involved in violating Palestinian human rights through business ties to Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The vast majority of the total 214 companies, which are based in 11 countries, are Israeli. Five of the 158 companies listed last year were removed in the latest update.

The blacklist, first published in 2020, was born of a vote by the UN’s human rights council, which has no ability to force companies to act. Its main goal is to name and shame businesses with ties to the settlements.

It is unclear how the inclusion on the list has affected the companies financially.

“This report is another reminder to companies that they have human rights responsibilities and are expected to conduct due diligence to ensure that they do not become involved in human rights violations or abuses,” said Volker Türk, the UN human rights chief, in a statement.

Israel said it “categorically rejects” the publication. “This database is meant to serve as a blacklist against businesses that have committed no wrongdoing,” the Israeli diplomatic mission in Geneva said in a statement. “We call on friends not to yield to this ugly attempt to blacklist Israeli firms.”

The UN office said it had advised the companies of their listing and given them a right of reply.

The latest report comes as Israeli settlements in Palestinian areas have faced new scrutiny.

Earlier this month, Britain banned trade with Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, where it says “settler terrorists” are carrying out “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians. France and Canada announced they would take similar action.

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Prepping For A Cashless Control Grid How Digital Currency Becomes Digital Control

When Money Stops Being Money

Something fundamental is vanishing, and most people will not notice until it is already gone. Not with a declaration. Not with a law passed in the dead of night. Simply, gradually, the option to buy something without creating a permanent record will disappear. The ability to save purchasing power outside of a system that can freeze it, monitor it, or program it will become a memory that seems almost fictional to those who never experienced it.

I have watched this unfold over years of observing payment systems, reading central bank white papers that few citizens bother to examine, and noticing how my own transactions leave increasingly detailed trails. The pattern is consistent across nations: convenience precedes surveillance, and surveillance precedes control.

We are not approaching a cashless society. We are sleepwalking into it. And for anyone who values independence, privacy, or the basic human right to conduct commerce without surveillance, this represents not progress but regression toward a form of control that previous generations would have recognized immediately and resisted forcefully.

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are the mechanism of this transformation. The digital euro, the potential digital dollar, the digital yuan already operational in China – these are not simply modernizations of payment systems. They are structural changes to the relationship between the individual and the state, between commerce and surveillance, between freedom and permission. Once fully implemented, they would create a financial infrastructure where every transaction is visible, every purchase is logged, and every economic decision requires implicit or explicit approval from authorities.

This is not speculation. This is documented policy. The Bank for International Settlements, which coordinates central banking globally, has explicitly stated that CBDCs will enable “programmable money” – currency that can be restricted based on time, place, or purpose. The European Central Bank’s digital euro project includes provisions for offline payments only up to limited amounts, with all larger transactions requiring network connectivity and identity verification. The Federal Reserve’s FedNow system, launched in July 2023, created the technical infrastructure for instant digital payments that serves as the foundation for eventual CBDC implementation.

Three developments demand immediate attention:

1. Over 130 countries representing 98 percent of global GDP are now exploring CBDC implementation, with 11 countries including China, Nigeria, and the Bahamas already operational.

2. The United States government has accumulated over 207,000 bitcoin through seizures and asset forfeiture, creating a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” via Executive Order in March 2025, effectively centralizing control of assets that were designed to resist centralized control.

3. Cash usage has declined 60 percent in the United States since 2017, with 41 percent of Americans reporting they use no cash in a typical week, removing the practical habit of anonymous exchange before the infrastructure to support it disappears.

The implications extend far beyond convenience or efficiency. They strike at the heart of what it means to be a free individual in a society that claims to value liberty.

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So-Called Moderate Governor Candidate Wants More Trans Books in Elementary Schools

Iowa Democratic gubernatorial nominee Rob Sand said he would oppose efforts to restrict books about homosexuality and transgenderism geared toward children.

Kailee Coleman, a social media influencer, said in an interview with Sand — who currently serves as Iowa state auditor — that she is a “banned book children’s author” and asked if he would allow further “book bans” in the state.

“If they try to do any more book bans, I’m going to veto them. My pledge is that I’m going to veto culture war bills,” Sand responded.

“I think that’s one of them. I want the legislature to be focused on issues that impact 100 percent of Iowans.”

The interview with Coleman and Sand was originally posted on TikTok and shared Thursday on X by Iowa First Media.

Coleman also asked Sand about the “changes” he would make as governor “to ensure our transgender and nonbinary neighbors feel safe and valued in Iowa.”

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Flock’s Optional Gunshot Detection Feature Has Fourth Amendment Implications for Gun Owners

Flock is just one of many suppliers in the global gunshot detection market, which has an estimated total value of $1.5 billion. But the company’s marketing material raises concerns about the technology’s capabilities, which go beyond simply detecting gunfire. In Flock’s own words, a confirmed gunshot “can surface the vehicles seen entering or leaving the area around the time of the sound, using nearby Flock license plate reader cameras.” That statement deserves scrutiny, since it describes a mechanism for turning suspected gunfire into a list of nearby vehicles.

Innocent gun owners could end up on such lists. Suppose a bang recorded by one of these microphones gets classified as gunfire (which it may not actually be, given the possibility of a false positive from a similar noise). That “confirmed event” can trigger an ALPR [automated license plate recognition] inquiry that sweeps in drivers who had nothing to do with the noise. In a country where more than 20 million people have carry permits and 29 states do not require them, some of those drivers will be lawfully armed. The proximity of those innocent drivers could be mistaken for evidence that they fired the shot.

This possibility raises two legal concerns for lawful gun owners. First, what justifies stopping a person on one of these lists? Second, is querying the database a search under the Fourth Amendment? Recent cases provide some answers.

The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen protects lawful public carry. In the 2024 case United States v. Daniels, which involved the detention of an unarmed man who did not match a 911 caller’s description of armed men, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit noted that no crime was reported. Citing Bruen, the court said it “cannot look with suspicion on citizens presumably exercising their Second Amendment rights in a lawful way.”

Last May in Commonwealth v. Foster, by contrast, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld a stop where police responded within seconds to late-night alerts from a gunfire microphone, found only two people, and observed conduct the court considered evasive. An investigative stop requires reasonable suspicion based on specific facts connecting someone to suspected criminal activity. The risk here is that an alert combined with a plate match could be treated as sufficient for reasonable suspicion even though it only establishes proximity.

A recent case from New Jersey illustrates that risk. Last March, in State v. Carrillo, a state appeals court ordered suppression of evidence (an unlawfully possessed handgun) discovered in a minivan after a traffic stop. The police searched the minivan after obtaining a warrant. But the court held that a gunshot alert and an ALPR hit did not adequately connect the minivan to a shooting the day before. Prosecutors conceded that video supposedly showing muzzle flashes from the minivan at the time of the gunfire actually showed none.

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Academic Survey Finds 35 Percent of Americans Can’t Name All Three Branches of Government

The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center recently conducted a survey that found 35% of Americans can’t name the three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial.

This is an amazing indictment of our education system, but it also raises questions about our national discourse.

For instance, virtually everyone has an opinion about politics, and many people these days seem to think that they are experts in the topic. How is that possible when a third of Americans lack basic civics knowledge?

Campus Reform reports:

35% of Americans cannot name all three branches of government: SURVEY

A new survey found significant gaps in Americans’ basic civic knowledge, including that more than one-third of U.S. adults cannot name all three branches of government.

The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center found that just 65 percent of respondents correctly named the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The survey, conducted Aug. 6-9, included a nationally representative sample of 1,034 U.S. adults and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

The survey also examined Americans’ ability to identify the rights protected by the First Amendment.

Seventy-three percent of respondents named freedom of speech as a right protected under the First Amendment, while only 43 percent named freedom of religion, 31 percent named freedom of assembly, 29 percent named freedom of the press, and just 12 percent named the right to petition the government.

Only 9 percent could name all five protections, while 24 percent could not name a single one. Moreover, 25 percent of respondents mistakenly said the right to bear arms, protected under the Second Amendment, is a First Amendment right.

“Ignorance is costly. You can’t protect and cherish rights that you don’t know you have,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director emerita of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, said.

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PETA Appears to Run Cover for Brutal Monkey Torturer After Obama-Appointed Judge Reverses Trump’s Harvard Funding Freeze

PETA has spent three years telling its donors that the “lights are out” on Harvard neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone’s cruel infant-monkey lab, but federal records say otherwise.

A new notice of funding, thanks at least in part to an Obama-appointed judge reversing President Donald Trump’s Harvard funding freeze, came just sixteen months after PETA toasted “the end of Margaret Livingstone’s career as tormenter of baby monkeys.”

NIH RePORTER still lists Livingstone as the contact principal investigator on a National Eye Institute award at Harvard Medical School with an award notice dated September 11, 2026, fiscal year 2026 funding of $850,148; a budget period running September 1, 2026, through August 31, 2027; and a project end date of August 31, 2028.

Livingstone was also awarded a new grant on April 17, 2025, with fiscal year 2025 funding of $576,474; a project start date of May 1, 2025; a subsequent award notice dated June 1, 2026, for fiscal year 2026 funding of $576,201; and a project end date of April 30, 2029.

PETA’s May 27, 2025, release claimed a “massive victory” and said funding for the baby-monkey experiments “has been terminated.”

A PETA news post updated May 28, 2025, said “the lights have finally gone out on Margaret Livingstone’s dark experiments on baby monkeys” and that the work was on Harvard’s list of canceled federal grants.

PETA2 told younger readers the same week, “the lights are finally out” and “NIH just pulled the plug.

NIH itself posted on May 29, 2025, that it had “terminated funding at Harvard University for studies that included sewing the eyes of young monkeys shut.”

Then, a Boston judge gave the money back.

On September 3, 2025, U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs, an Obama appointee, granted Harvard summary judgment, vacated the administration’s freeze orders and termination letters, and barred the government from giving those letters any force.

The NIH termination letter dated May 6, 2025, was among the letters she set aside. The judgment vacated “all freezes and terminations of funding to Harvard made pursuant to the Freeze Orders and Termination Letters on or after April 14, 2025.”

The Daily Caller reported this week that taxpayer money is still moving through multiple Livingstone grants, including the new $850,000 award posted this month and a multi-year grant running through 2029.

PETA’s own description of the “maternal deprivation” horrors in Livingstone’s lab includes infant macaques taken from their mothers, some raised with only a cloth surrogate, some fitted with vision-distorting goggles or strobe-like conditions for months, some with eyelids sewn shut, some implanted with electrode arrays, and many later killed and dissected.

Former NIH Director Francis Collins privately called related maternal-deprivation work “third-rate,” according to the Daily Caller.

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OpenAI admits another rogue agent incident

OpenAI’s agents have leaked 53 images uploaded by ChatGPT users, the company has said, without specifying whether the pictures were AI-generated or depictions of real people, or when they were posted online.

The incident comes amid a series of cases in recent months involving autonomous AI agents, which can independently plan and carry out tasks using external tools. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have all revealed instances in which their models accessed real systems during testing, including coordinated cyberattacks against government resources.

In a post on X on Friday, OpenAI said most of the leaked pictures had been removed, adding that it was working with hosting providers to take down the remaining content.

The agents had access to the images because OpenAI relies on anonymized user data for part of its model-training process, Reuters reported on Friday, citing the company, its former employees and outside researchers.

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Does Britain Have a Free Speech Problem?

When Keir Starmer visited the White House in February 2025, J.D. Vance used the occasion to raise what he called “infringements on free speech” in Britain. Our then Prime Minister, sitting a few feet away in the Oval Office, was having none of it. “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom,” he said, “and it will last for a very, very long time.” He added that he was “very proud of our history there”.

Was Sir Keir right to dismiss those concerns? I want to answer that question not with anecdotes, of which I have a great many, but with numbers.

Arrests, charges and convictions

Let’s start with a new report from Big Brother Watch, entitled Britain’s Free Speech Problem. Its headline finding is that between January 1st 2021 and December 31st 2025, 62,199 people were arrested in the UK on suspicion of committing just three communications offences. These are section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which criminalises sending a “grossly offensive” message over a public electronic network; section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988; and section 179 of the Online Safety Act 2023, the new “false communications” offence.

That’s a shocking figure, but it’s an underestimate. Several police forces didn’t respond to Big Brother Watch’s Freedom of Information requests, including Police Scotland. Big Brother Watch estimates the true figure is 73,023. So on a conservative estimate, the police are arresting an average of 34 people a day for things they’ve said, the vast majority online, and the true figure is closer to 40 a day. Russia, incidentally, is thought to arrest around 400 people a year for similar offences.

Of those 62,199 people, 18,520 were charged and 12,292 were convicted. That’s more than 12,000 people with criminal records for speech offences in five years. And that number is likely to go up if the proposals to curtail the right to trial by jury, first put forward by David Lammy when he was Justice Secretary, become law. Research by the Free Speech Union found that in the year to June 2025, 14% of people tried for speech offences in a magistrates’ court were acquitted, compared with 33% in the Crown Court, where the case was heard by a jury. Twelve ordinary men and women, it turns out, are less likely than a district judge to conclude that an intemperate tweet merits a criminal conviction. Leave the decision to them and more people will be convicted.

Is it getting worse?

But is the number of people being arrested for speech offences actually increasing? Yes, it is, as a similar piece of research by the Times established last year. It FoI’d every police force in England and Wales and asked how many arrests they’d made relating to just two of those three offences: section 127 of the Communications Act and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act.

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