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.

Nancy Pelosi Denies That Democrats Had Any Advanced Knowledge of Eric Swalwell’s Behavior

Today on CSPAN, former house speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked if she or other Democrats had any advanced knowledge of Eric Swalwell’s behavior or the things he has been accused of.

The host framed it as an accusation that Republicans are making, rather than pointing out that people all over the country are now admitting that Swalwell’s issues were an open secret for years.

Pelosi denied the whole thing, saying it is “absolutely not true.”

Pelosi’s comments are in direct conflict with a new report from ABC 7 in California (emphasis is ours):

U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell has suspended his campaign for California governor following sexual assault allegations, announcing the decision Sunday as scrutiny intensified around the Democratic primary race.

In a statement, Swalwell said he would step aside to address the claims.

“To my family, staff, friends, and supporters, I am deeply sorry for mistakes in judgment I’ve made in my past. I will fight the serious, false allegations that have been made – but that’s my fight, not a campaign’s.”

The suspension immediately reshaped a closely watched contest in which Swalwell had held a narrow lead among Democrats.

Criticism of Swalwell has circulated in Washington for years, according to former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who spoke on ABC’s “This Week.”

“Every member in Congress knows not to let any young staffer around Swalwell or Matt Gaetz, it’s not a secret there,” McCarthy said.

Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown said the allegations were not unexpected, citing longstanding talk among Democratic leaders.

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Political pressure from Somali community hampered Minnesota fraud probes, whistleblower says

A key whistle-blower, and one of the first to draw attention to what he believed was widespread fraud in the Minnesota welfare system, says that state officials hampered probes into the allegations over concerns about pressure from the state’s Somali immigrant community. 

That community has been at the center of recent welfare fraud accusations, including the Feeding Our Future fraud case, in which prosecutors say more than 70 defendants — most of them part of Minneapolis’ Somali community — were charged in connection to a $250 million pandemic-era fraud on a state-funded meals program for children. 

Last year, new charges in the Feeding Our Future case sparked renewed interest in the state’s federally-funded daycare program. Independent journalists flocked to Minneapolis and recorded videos of empty daycare centers that had received millions in state grants. 

“It was obvious that they were committing fraud”: DHS investigator

But, concerns about Minneapolis daycare centers go back at least a decade, according to the whistle-blower, Scott Dexter, who worked as an investigator at the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) from 2013 to 2019. He told Just the News that his team uncovered evidence of fraud in the state’s taxpayer-funded daycare system almost immediately after he started his work. 

“The very first [daycare] that we investigated […] had received about $3.75 million in one year, and so it was obvious that they were committing fraud,” Dexter told the Just the News, No Noise TV show on Tuesday.  

“And the number of these childcare centers would be owned by the same owners, or there’d be, you know, intertwined people involved in it. So one daycare center was involved with another daycare center, so it was obvious that it was a coordinated fraud scheme,” said Dexter. 

In his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee earlier this year, Dexter said that he was hired after a 28-year law enforcement career to be part of a new investigative unit in the Office of the Inspector General at the Minnesota DHS tasked with identifying fraud in the state’s Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP). 

Dexter testified that what his team uncovered was “deeply concerning” regarding daycare centers operating out of commercial spaces “with windows covered, no visible play areas, and very few children ever present.” After reviewing records and surveilling locations, they found “documented patterns of overbilling, nonexistent attendance, and in some cases, children being signed in for hours they were never actually at the center.” 

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Can’t bomb your way out of a logistical bottleneck

When officials from the United States and Iran walked away from negotiations in Pakistan this weekend with no deal on the Strait of Hormuz, markets didn’t wait for clarity. They reacted. The subsequent announcement by United States Central Command of a naval blockade targeting Iranian ports was meant to reassure. Instead, it raised more questions than answers.

Markets, as they often do, may be reading this correctly.

The Strait of Hormuz is not just another geopolitical hotspot. It is one of the most critical arteries of the global economy. Roughly 20% of the world’s oil and close to 30% of globally traded fertilizers pass through that narrow corridor. When flows are threatened, the consequences extend far beyond energy markets. They move quickly into agriculture, food production, and ultimately, the prices Canadians pay at the grocery store.

Oil prices are now back above $100 USD per barrel, but the real story began months ago. Markets started pricing in Middle East risks early in the year. In the food economy, there is typically a six- to nine-month lag between energy shocks and retail food prices. That means the inflationary pressure we are beginning to feel today was already set in motion weeks ago.

For Canadian consumers, it is already too late to avoid it.

The first signs are now emerging across the food system. Transport companies, facing extraordinary volatility, are reintroducing fuel surcharges and adjusting contracts upward. Suppliers are hedging aggressively. These costs do not stay within the supply chain—they get passed along.

Fresh produce will be among the first categories to reflect this shift. Fruits and vegetables rely heavily on long-distance, temperature-controlled transport, making them highly sensitive to fuel costs. Canadians should expect price increases in the range of 5% to 15% over the coming months, particularly for imported items. Meat and seafood will follow. These products are energy-intensive at every stage—from feed production to processing and refrigeration—and are likely to rise by 5% to 10%, with beef leading the way.

Dairy products will also move higher, though more gradually, as rising energy costs affect processing and distribution. Increases of 4% to 8% are likely over the next few quarters. Even staples like bread and cereals will not be spared. Fertilizer markets, closely tied to energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz, will push grain production costs higher, resulting in price increases of 3% to 6%. Processed foods, exposed to energy at multiple stages, will also climb steadily.

These are not isolated adjustments. They reflect a broader reality. Historically, a sustained rise in oil prices adds between one and three percentage points to food inflation in Canada. Under current conditions, grocery inflation could easily climb back toward 6% to 8%. For households, that translates into real money. Every sustained 25% increase in oil prices typically adds $150 to $200 annually to the average grocery bill. With oil already surging, the total impact could be several hundred dollars per family.

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Embattled Rep Tony Gonzales announces plans to resign amid sexual misconduct allegations

Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, abruptly announced his decision to resign from Congress Monday evening amid calls for him to step aside after admitting to sexual misconduct with a staffer earlier this year.

The embattled lawmaker is facing an anticipated expulsion vote that could occur as early as this week. 

“There is a season for everything and God has a plan for us all. When Congress returns tomorrow, I will file my retirement from office,” Gonzales wrote on social media. “It has been my privilege to serve the great people of Texas.”

It is currently unclear when Gonzales will formally resign. A spokesperson for Gonzales did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Gonzales has come under bipartisan pressure to immediately step aside or face expulsion following his acknowledgment of an affair with his former staffer, Regina Santos-Aviles, who later died by setting herself on fire.

Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez, D-N.M., has vowed to move forward with her expulsion resolution if Gonzales does not quickly resign.

“He has until 2PM tomorrow—when we will file his expulsion. He better write that resignation “effective immediately,” Leger Fernandez wrote on social media.

He first admitted to an affair with Santos-Aviles during a radio interview in March after repeatedly denying the existence of a sexual relationship.

“I made a mistake, and I had a lapse in judgment, and there was a lack of faith, and I take full responsibility for those actions,” Gonzales told conservative radio host Joe Pags during the interview. “Since then, I’ve reconciled with my wife, Angel. I’ve asked God to forgive me, which he has, and my faith is as strong as ever.” 

Gonzales, who is married and has six children, has not acknowledged a second accusation of sexual misconduct with a former aide reported by The San Antonio-Express News.

Lawmakers are prohibited from engaging in sexual relationships with staffers, per House rules. 

His announcement came just an hour after Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., said he planned to resign from the lower chamber amid serious allegations of sexual misconduct and rape. The California Democrat has not specified the particular day he plans to leave office.

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Democrats Are the Freak Show of Politics

The Democratic Party has become an insane asylum, and no one can distinguish the inmates from the orderlies.  

Today’s liberals parade against “fascism” by dressing as frogs, waving timeworn marital aids in the air, and, during moments where impulse control is harder to find than Bigfoot, launching mashed potatoes at their pitiful spouses.

Now that Eric Swalwell has debauched his way out of the race for California governor, fury-girl Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.), who is really chummy with one of Swalwell’s timely accusers, finds herself one step closer to running the largest state in the union deeper into the outhouse history. But Porter has some anger-prone skeletons herself.

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Virginia Governor Signs Law Banning ‘Ghost Guns’

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed a bill to ban so-called “ghost guns,” another making it easier to sue gunmakers and sellers, and two other bills concerning possession of firearms by persons under court orders.

The bills – signed on April 10 – are among more than two dozen gun control and gun safety bills that the Virginia General Assembly sent to Spanberger after its regular session ended on March 24.

“Preventing gun violence is an issue of public safety – both for the officers who protect our streets and the children and families they work to keep safe,” the governor said in a statement.

Spanberger signed Senate Bill 323, which bans the manufacture, sale, and possession of firearms without serial numbers.

The new law also outlaws any gun that “after removal of all parts other than a major component, … is not detectable as a firearm when subjected to inspection by the types of detection devices, including X-ray machines, commonly used at airports, government buildings, schools, correctional facilities, and other locations for security screening.”

Senate Bill 27, which Spanberger also signed, sets standards of “responsible conduct” for firearm manufacturers, distributors, and retailers.

It calls for “reasonable controls” over the manufacture, sale, distribution, use, and marketing of firearm-related products.

It also allows the attorney general, local government attorneys, or private citizens to sue firearm businesses for injunctions, damages, and costs.

Spanberger also signed two bills concerning the possession of firearms by those under court orders.

According to Spanberger’s office, Senate Bill 160 closes an “intimate partner loophole” by prohibiting intimate partners convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence crimes from possessing a firearm.

The law adds to the definition of “family or household member,” an individual who, “within the previous 12 months, was in a romantic, dating, or sexual relationship with the person.”

Senate Bill 38 allows a person subject to a protective order or convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence and prohibited from possessing a firearm, to transfer their firearm to a person who is age 21 or older, who does not live in their home, and can legally own a gun.

These bills are the first of a slate of gun control and gun safety laws to be signed after the most recent session.

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Another Red State, Fully Californicated

“20 years ago Colorado was a Red state and thriving,” the State Leadership Initiative posted late last week. “10 years ago liberals were writing pieces about how Colorado was the next Silicon Valley.” And now CBS News reports that “Colorado is losing businesses and jobs at an alarming rate.”

This was the hope, according to Denver-based 5280 magazine in 2020: “With another tech company setting up an office in Denver, the state could become a magnet for Silicon Valley firms and other prestigious businesses during the worst economic climate in nearly a century.”

Instead of Silicon Mountain, Colorado is quickly becoming “an economic backwater,” as SLI put it, “an omen for what happens when Red states go blue.”

It seems like only last week [It was just last week, Steve —Editor] I shared the schadenfreudelicious tale of how one TDS-suffering Delaware judge launched an exodus of big-name firms led by Elon Musk. Today, I must share similar news about my once-beloved home state of Colorado.

“The Colorado Chamber of Commerce has been sounding an alarm for years about excessive regulation,” CBS reported, and “the Chamber also said that companies are also relocating out-of-state.” According to the story, “since 2019, 98 companies have either left the state, expanded elsewhere, or scrapped plans to move here.” In the last four years, we’ve lost a total of 34 corporate headquarters, too. 

The most recent big name to leave is Palantir, the AI firm recently touted by President Donald Trump for its invaluable contributions to Operation Epic Fury. With basically zero fanfare, the company announced last week that it’s moved its HQ to Miami. 

“We are going to be hurting Colordans not just now, but the next generation, the next generation after that. And we just want to course correct,” tech entrepreneur and investor Dan Caruso wrote to Democrat Gov. Jared Polis in a letter signed by more than 200 business and civic leaders.

Polis and the Democrat-dominated statehouse made some polite noises about maybe looking into something resembling deregulation someday soonish, but Colorado requires so much more.

Let’s go back to something I wrote almost exactly one year ago, when we looked at what Colorado was like before and after 2018, the year Democrats took full control of the state government.

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How Many People Have the US and Israel Killed in Iran?

After the breakdown of talks in Pakistan, the ceasefire between the US and Iran is more fragile than ever, and now seems likely to give way to a new phase of the war. The ceasefire and talks have failed to end Israel’s devastating attacks on Lebanon or to negotiate international access to the Strait of Hormuz, now under Iran’s control.

The world must use this pause in the war to push for a permanent ceasefire and peace agreement, but we must also start to assess the true human cost of the war–something the US is always reluctant to do in its wars, from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan. While we always know the exact number of Americans killed in these wars, we never have an accurate tally of how many people we have killed–not only because it is often hard to get the data, but also because the US systematically downplays civilian casualties and treats their lives as less valuable.

We saw this from the very first day of this war. The US carried out a double-tap strike on a girls’ elementary school in Minab, killing 175, mostly young girls. Trump’s response was to blame Iran: “In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran,” he said, and later suggested that Iran might have gotten hold of a Tomahawk missile and used it to kill its own people.

Minab is not an isolated case – it is a window into a much broader failure by the US government and media, as well as the Iranian government and international media, to honestly reveal the human toll of this 40-day war.

The Iran Health Ministry’s casualty figures have not been updated in any detail since March 29, when it put Iranian casualties at 2,076 killed and 26,500 wounded, and there is an obvious mismatch between these two numbers. The ratio between them is much higher than in other wars, or even when compared with the Israeli assault on Lebanon in this war, where Lebanon’s Health Ministry reported 1,830 people killed and 4.927 wounded by April 10, a ratio of 2.7 to 1 between the wounded and the dead.

For further comparison, UN figures for civilian casualties in the war in Ukraine are 15,172 and 41,378 wounded, which is also a ratio of 2.7 to 1. These are certainly under-estimates, like civilian casualty counts in every war, but the ratio between deaths and injuries is realistic, unlike that in Tehran’s casualty figures.

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Uglification As Control: The Assault on Beauty

This morning at 4 am, something not unusual (for me) happened: I woke with an insight after falling asleep mid-chapter reading C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy. Ransom, his main character, was based on J.R.R. Tolkien, and I had been having a conversation with Professor Tolkien in my sleep. 

What I wrote down was this: Triptych: Wealth. Power. Beauty.

These are the three things humans desire. Beauty is generally within our reach. Wealth and power must be worked for but are achievable in our great Western civilization. And these are precisely the things that socialist and Marxist movements, or indeed any ideology that seeks control over others, work to destroy. It’s not that they hate the good and the beautiful so much as that the desire to dominate is more powerful. In The Lord of the Rings, Sauron and Saruman knew that domination of others is easiest when people are hungry, diminished, and surrounded by the drab and the ugly.

Of the three, I am most fascinated by beauty. 

Power and Wealth

Everyone knows about the first panel, wealth. As socialism creeps into a system, we see more and more confiscation of wealth: progressive taxation, expensive regulatory tangles, redistributionism, and equity. Promises of fairness harden into, as the hobbits in “The Scouring of the Shire” discovered, the powerful gathering far more than is ever shared back out. The ordinary man is “given” just enough to stay sated but hungry, kept dependent upon the government.

Power follows quickly. Bureaucracies centralize decision-making in government and industry. HR departments make cold decisions about employee relations. Grant bodies and cultural gatekeepers decide what projects are funded. The independent powers — families, churches, businesses, local private organizations, local communities — are crowded out or regulated into irrelevance. Eventually, only the central powers are granting permission for things that were once free.

Beauty is different. Beauty affirms the spirit and soothes the soul, affirms dignity and self-worth, and makes people hard to rule. 

The Uglification of the Shire

Tolkien shows us exactly how it works. The ruffians and “gatherers and sharers” that took over the peaceful Shire don’t just loot; they uglify. They close the old inns, fell beloved trees, replace hobbit-holes with ugly, mean brick houses, pollute the water, and craft and post ugly rules and propaganda. But why bother making things hideous? Why is it important to destroy beauty? 

Because beauty is quietly powerful. The ordinary hobbit could go outside in the evening and smoke his pipe, gazing out across the lovely green hills of the Shire. Daily, they saw that life could be ordered, delightful, and worth defending. Once beauty is ruined, there is less to care about, less to fight for. Compliance becomes normal — after all, the Party Tree has already been cut down and left to rot, so there’s nothing to fight for. Quaint Bagshot Row is an open quarry. Gatherers take surplus and more, despoiling what they don’t take. The hobbits grumble, of course, but they are demoralized, hungry but not starving, and much easier to control because they just don’t care anymore.

We saw the same things in the old Soviet Union. Socialist realism, with its austere lines and solid colors, replaced real art with propaganda posters praising the USSR and the worker. Beautiful, graceful cathedrals and exotic Russian onion domes were replaced by brutalist concrete blocks. Fashion and music and gathering places, things of delight, were flattened into drabness, functional but not fun. Because the state could not redistribute beauty, and because beauty gives people joy and hope, beauty was pathologized, called bourgeois, and replaced with an antiseptic, dark aesthetic. The common man was given enough “culture” to be sated, but never enough to satisfy the hunger of his soul for beauty. Other, darker things filled that void.

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Pro-Vaccine Panelists: ‘We’re Losing the PR and Communications Battle’

The medical industry is losing control of the vaccine narrative, according to participants in a webinar moderated by Chelsea Clinton and organized by Unity Consortium — a group of pharmaceutical companies and pro-vaccine organizations.

Vaccine makers GSK, Merck and Sanofi, along with Big Tech platforms Reddit and Snapchat, and Spanish-language media giant Televisa Univision sponsored Wednesday’s event: “Who Influences Young People’s Health Choices? The New Conversations About Vaccines.”

Unity Consortium lists Pfizer, Merck, GSK and Sanofi among its members. Vaccine inventor Dr. Paul Offit is a member of its board of directors.

During the hour-long conversation, Clinton and the panelists criticized the growing number of parents and teens who are starting to question the safety of vaccines. They blamed the trend on increased access to what they characterized as online “misinformation” — and on organizations like Children’s Health Defense (CHD).

“What’s different today … is that people have access to a lot more information,” said Dr. Margot Savoy, chief medical officer of the American Academy of Family Physicians. “The part that makes me nervous is that, more and more, we’re getting into this odd space where people are feeling a little more polarized.”

Jessica Steier, founder and CEO of Unbiased Science and author of “The Playbook Used to ‘Prove’ Vaccines Cause Autism,” said pro-vaccine voices are “losing the PR and communications battle.”

Elisabeth Marnik, Ph.D., executive director of The Evidence Collective and author of “I Grew Up Unvaccinated. Now I’m an Immunologist,” said the circulation of and public access to such information is “one of the hardest parts about social media.”

“The more somebody sees these false claims circulating, the more likely they are to start to question their own understanding. And that’s one of the dangers of social media,” Marnik said. She said that parents’ decisions not to vaccinate their children are “a product of [this] information ecosystem.”

Clinton suggested that the ecosystem acts as a barrier to sustaining trust in the medical profession and public health. “The algorithms are part of the challenge of both … the corrosion of trust and … the barriers to replenishing and sustaining that trust,” Clinton said.

According to Marnik, the public health establishment is losing public trust because “public health and science aren’t always good storytellers.” The “anti-vaccine side” is “really good at spreading these stories that are really compelling and very scary and [that] can motivate people in ways that are harmful.”

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