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.

Spy TVs: 200 million Smart TVs serve as eavesdropping and listening devices — even when switched off

Remember when the government used to have to plant an electronic bug inside the home or office of a suspected criminal, and they needed to get a search warrant providing solid evidence of criminal wrongdoing before they could plant such a device?

Those days are long over, as most of us purchase the bug ourselves and set it up in our living rooms. Most, if not all, smart TVs, along with smartphones, smart appliances, etc., are daily collecting loads of data on every individual and family in America.

Cybernews reports in a September 8, 2026 article that LG Corp.’s smart TVs can listen in on voice commands, gather data that reveals your location, and scan your home for other connected devices, according to a major new investigation into the company’s webOS platform.

LG Electronics, maker of the smart TVs, is owned by the South Korean conglomerate LG Corp., which after Samsung is the world’s second-largest maker of internet-connected smart televisions.

Researchers working with independent technology outlet Gamers Nexus captured LG televisions scanning local networks and identifying phones, smartwatches, printers, air-conditioning units, and many other everyday consumer devices and appliances that had never been connected to the TV. These devices all have one thing in common, however. They are all connected to the internet and are part of the “internet of things.”

I’m pretty sure that if a similar test was run on other brands of smart TVs, the results would be similar, but this article focuses exclusively on LG as that was the company that was placed under a microscope by the independent researchers in their recent study.

Their investigation found that LG’s televisions use an advertising technology called Automatic Content Recognition, or ACR, to identify what was being watched across different inputs, while voice interactions could be converted into plain text and stored in logs on the television. In other words, the TV’s speakers hear what you’re saying and the software is trained, probably using AI, to make a note of it and feed this information into algorithms.

In one test, researchers said voice data continued to be stored even after the TV was disconnected from the internet.

Smart TVs are not only ubiquitous in homes, but in hotel rooms, hospitals and corporate offices, “potentially placing them alongside sensitive conversations and devices,” Cybernews reports.

Gamers Nexus worked with cybersecurity researchers MrBruh and unturn, alongside Wendell Wilson of Level1Techs, to investigate LG TVs and the company’s webOS software. The results are presented in a video (below) posted to YouTube.

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Evidence Continues to Emerge Linking COVID-19 Shots to Rising Cancer Risks

For the last five years, the War Department has largely overlooked whistleblower warnings about the adverse effects of the COVID-19 shot on military personnel, which include rising cancer rates and even death. This total disregard by the Biden administration has long raised concerns regarding the health and safety of those who serve.

In light of this, Dr. Theresa Long, an Army doctor board-certified in aerospace medicine, has recently been appointed as the senior medical military adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Her role includes examining whether COVID-19 shots contributed to the deaths of more than 2,500 military personnel.

The previous administration may have attempted to conceal the health conditions initially identified in the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED), even in the face of a “notable rise in several serious medical diagnoses,” including cancer.

Given that the military is a subset of the broader U.S. population, it is likely that Dr. Long will discover that cancer has contributed to some of these fatalities.

Cancer among service members has made the headlines on more than one occasion, as evidenced by the subsequent health struggles of key military officials in recent years. Former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was diagnosed with prostate cancer in December 2023 but kept it hidden for months.

Shortly after Austin revealed his condition, Col. Tara Lunardi, Deputy Commander of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, passed away from cancer.

In October 2023, retired Navy Medical Service Corps officer Lt. Ted Macie warned Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti about potential cancer risks potentially linked to the shot. Ironically, in June 2024, she found a lump in her breast during a routine screening.

Research published in peer-reviewed journals, which consists of scholarly and scientific articles assessed and approved by experts in the relevant field before publication, indicates an increase in cancer cases following the distribution of the COVID-19 shots.

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DATA CENTER MYTH BUSTED: No Jobs, Higher Debt, Slower Housing

The data-center gold rush has marched into local communities on one familiar promise: Big Tech brings jobs, growth, and prosperity.

A new 75-page academic working paper found something very different.

Finance scholars Liu Ee Chia, Jess Cornaggia, David Haushalter, and Qiang Wang compared U.S. counties with operational data centers against “near-miss” counties that attracted proposals but never got operating facilities.

They found little corresponding improvement in fiscal capacity, local employment, or business formation.

Instead, local-government borrowing costs climbed as data-center development grew. Water-bond yields rose 26 basis points more in water-scarce counties than in water-abundant counties.

The paper also found higher school-bond yields in major data-center hubs, where housing-price growth slowed. The authors said those patterns aligned with a weaker expected property-tax base.

“Overall, we conclude that investment without labor strains public infrastructure without generating widespread agglomeration gains.” — Liu Ee Chia, Jess Cornaggia, David Haushalter, and Qiang Wang

Saagar Enjeti highlighted the study’s bottom line: data centers can pull capital and utilities into a county without delivering the broad labor-market gains that politicians and corporate developers sell.

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USPS Inspector General Confirms It: Postal Facilities Botched Mail Ballots in the 2026 Primaries — Wrong Dates in Pennsylvania, No Training on the Wall, and Delayed Ballots Headed Into a Midterm Fight

A new federal audit has exposed serious failures in the U.S. Postal Service’s handling of election mail during the 2026 primary season, including incorrectly postmarked ballots, missing tracking information, delayed deliveries and ballots shipped hundreds of miles in the wrong direction.

ProPublica first reported the audit on September 9. The watchdog’s report is public: Processing of Election and Political Mail for the 2026 Primary Elections.

The September 4 audit by the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General examined nine mail-processing facilities and 73 delivery units across eight states between March and May.

While auditors found that most facilities generally followed election-mail procedures, and overall processing scores improved from the 2024 primaries, they also uncovered alarming breakdowns that could determine whether a lawful vote is counted.

The report found that management at 10 of the 82 facilities reviewed was unfamiliar with proper ballot-postmarking policies.

At five of nine mail-processing facilities, auditors discovered hand-canceling devices displaying incorrect dates.

At the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, processing center, a hand canceler being used on the May 19 primary election date was still set to March 19.

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Trump Announces $500 Obamacare Rebate Checks to Nearly 1 Million Americans “Wrongly Ripped Off” by Biden Administration

President Trump announced in a video statement on Thursday that rebate checks for families who were “wrongly ripped off” by the Biden Administration through the Obamacare exchange and healthcare.gov will be delivered ahead of the November elections. 

Checks to nearly one million Americans across 30 states will be delivered in “just a few weeks,” Trump said. The White House announced that checks will be sent to those eligible beginning in October.

Trump announced the initiative, dubbed the “Working Families Obamacare Refunds,” in a video statement.

WATCH:

Trump: Today, I’m very thrilled to make an important announcement on the cost of health care affecting hardworking families all across the United States. Our administration has discovered that under Sleepy Joe Biden, American households buying health insurance through the Obamacare exchange, which is a disaster, and the healthcare.gov were massively overcharged, to put it mildly.

They were forced to pay excessive fees, totaling at least $500 million. The last administration knew about this and they studied it, but they kept the money. They just kept it. They never let anyone know. Our administration is doing the right thing and giving the money back to the people who were wrongly ripped off.

Nearly one million hardworking Americans in 30 states will soon be getting refunds of $500 each with a check sent to their home address. In many cases, these refunds will cover the entire spike in your insurance caused by Democrats, who solely work to protect big insurance companies. The big insurance companies own the Democrats.

Congress must now quickly pass the Great Health Care Plan. It’s called the Great Health Care Plan. Cost of healthcare for all Americans is coming down under my plan. We will stop all payments to big insurance and give the money directly to the people, who will then be able to buy better health care at a much lower cost and keep the money and keep the difference.

We’ll have maximum price transparency and require all prices to be posted in plain, beautiful English, and we will get insurance companies to disclose their profits and how many claims they deny, so that we know the good ones from the bad. But the relief begins with refunding everyone who was overcharged. The rebates are going out in just a few weeks. Thank you very much.

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Mamdani Blindsided by Fresh Lawsuit — The NYC Mayor Now Has to Fight in Federal Court

New York City Zohran Mamdani will soon have to defend his socialist schemes in federal court.

That’s because of a fresh lawsuit that accuses his socialist supermarkets of “unfair competition” against local grocers.

The National Supermarket Association and two of its members – City Fresh Market in Harlem and C-Town Supermarket in the Bronx – are taking the mayor to court for violating antitrust laws. 

The litigants are filing their lawsuit in the Southern District of New York, which is not exactly renowned for its concern over civil rights.

The association’s president, Anthony Peña, told The Post that the millions of dollars going to the government-backed stores are a form of “unfair competition.”

“We are arguing that everyone has to be able to access these subsidies,” Peña said. “It’s not about us being afraid of competition. We are against unfair competition.”

The group represents 450 independent grocery stores in New York City. It is filing the complaint with the America First Policy Institute, which is chaired by Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s former top economic advisor.

“Independent supermarkets have invested in our neighborhoods, created jobs, paid taxes and served local families for generations,” Peña added. “They deserve a fair and level playing field – not competition against a government-subsidized program operating under different rules.”

The Mamdani grocery plan is now facing two major legal offensives — an August state-court challenge consisting of two separate MBC filings, and a new federal antitrust lawsuit from independent supermarket operators.

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INSANE: “Fat Queer” Communist Activist Declares GLP-1 Weight-Loss Drugs “Fascistic” — Claims Society Is “Genociding Fat People”

The radical left has apparently discovered its latest form of “fascism”: Americans using medication to lose weight and improve their health.

During the four-day Socialism 2026 conference in Chicago, self-described Black, fat, queer anarcho-communist activist Da’Shaun L. Harrison launched a bizarre attack on popular GLP-1 medications such as Ozempic, claiming the drugs represent a new phase of so-called “body fascism” while delivering the remarks in a face mask.

Harrison made the remarks during a September 5 panel titled “Health Fascism, Body Politics, and the Anti-State State.”

Harrison: “The political deployment of GLP-1s is fascistic, not because individuals take them, but because the conditions under which they become necessary are shaped by a world fixated on genociding fat people.

A shot that helps diabetics, heart patients, and obese Americans lose dangerous weight is, in this worldview, a tool of genocide.

Harrison did not stop there. The author of Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, a self-described Afropessimist, anarcho-communist, and trans theorist who uses they/them pronouns, tied the entire obesity debate to race, slavery, and “colonial surveillance.”

“This is a structural critique that asks what happens when the conditions produced by capitalism, by public health, by the state apparatus, and by anti-black desire align around a single bodily ideal that leaves little to no room for divergence and punishes any body that does.”

And then the academic name-drop:

“But to understand why the deployment of GLP-1s is fascistic requires turning to Frantz Fanon’s account of black flesh under colonial surveillance.”

BMI charts. Diet culture. Doctors telling patients they are overweight. All of it, according to Harrison, is “body fascism” built on the policing of “Black fat flesh.”

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D.C. Gas Ban Gets Favorable Hearing In Federal Appeals Court

A federal appeals panel appeared inclined Tuesday to let Washington, D.C.’s restrictions on natural gas in certain new buildings stand.

The case turns on the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, or EPCA, which gives the Department of Energy authority to set efficiency and energy-use standards for appliances including furnaces, water heaters, dryers and stoves. Industry groups argue that D.C. cannot accomplish through a building code what federal law prevents it from doing directly to an appliance.

The challengers include the National Association of Home Builders, Restaurant Law Center, National Apartment Association, Maryland Building Industry Association, Washington Gas and two labor unions.

D.C.’s Clean Buildings Act requires certain newly constructed or substantially improved buildings to operate at zero energy beginning in 2027. The building standards effectively prohibit natural-gas appliances in covered properties.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes upheld the law in March. Her ruling found that EPCA regulates how much energy covered appliances consume, not whether a local government permits those appliances to be installed in a particular building.

Bloomberg Law reported Tuesday that the D.C. Circuit panel appeared similarly unconvinced by the industry groups’ preemption argument during oral arguments.

Federal appeals courts are already split on essentially the same question.

The Ninth Circuit struck down Berkeley, California’s natural-gas piping ban in 2024, finding that a city could not evade EPCA by eliminating the fuel supply needed to operate federally regulated appliances. That ruling covers nine Western states.

The Second Circuit went the other direction in June. It upheld New York City and New York State restrictions on fossil-fuel appliances, finding that EPCA preempts appliance energy-conservation standards but does not prevent governments from prohibiting certain appliances altogether.

Washington’s case gives the D.C. Circuit the same statutory language and two competing appellate interpretations.

For builders, restaurants and gas utilities, the result determines whether D.C.’s 2027 requirements stand. For the natural gas industry, another ruling against preemption would leave Berkeley increasingly isolated – and gas appliance rules dependent on which federal circuit a building happens to sit in.

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