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.

Trump slams Canada as ‘most difficult and unreasonable’ nation as trade talks collapse

Tensions flared between Washington and Ottawa after President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to challenge Canadian leadership. Calling out Ottawa as the “most difficult and unreasonable” government to negotiate with — despite its ongoing reliance on the U.S. defense umbrella — Trump doubled down on his firm stance to hold Canada accountable.

The rhetoric exemplifies an escalation in an intensifying trade conflict, coming directly on the heels of collapsed negotiations and mounting cross-border economic retaliation.

In his social media posts, President Trump called out Canada for its exploitation, spanning decades, arguing that high Canadian tariffs on American agricultural products have damaged U.S. farming operations.

Highlighting long-standing grievances, Trump also cited steep dairy import duties and a ten-year regulatory delay in certifying U.S.-made Gulfstream jets — a move he said was designed to shield Canadian aviation competitors.

Trump asserted that the U.S. has sustained an average annual trade deficit of $60 billion with its northern neighbor, declaring that Washington would no longer tolerate the unfair dynamic.

The president’s public posts follow a sudden breakdown in formal trade talks.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney ordered Ottawa’s negotiating team to return home after Washington introduced terms that Canadian officials deemed “unfair and economically unviable.”

In response to the stalemate, Trump threatened to slap a 50% tariff on all Canadian cars, trucks, automotive components, and steel starting January 1, 2027. The economic threat directly targets one of the most deeply integrated manufacturing supply chains in North America, raising concerns among Canadians about rising consumer costs and disruption to regional assembly lines.

Canada responded by preparing dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs on hundreds of American products. Dominic LeBlanc, the minister responsible for Canada–U.S. trade, stated that while Ottawa had hoped for a mutually beneficial agreement, the government felt that it should act to protect domestic industries from unilateral U.S. penalties.

Trump also further provoked Canadian leadership by declaring on Truth Social that the U.S. might rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” referencing how the nation no longer expected to conduct business with the region.

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Report: Trump Admin Requests Ukraine Refrain From Striking Russia During Meetings

The Trump administration reportedly requested that Ukraine refrain from striking parts of Russia with missiles while the United States engaged in meetings with Russian officials.

Christopher Miller, the Chief Ukraine Correspondent for the Financial Times, shared in a post on X that officials in the Trump administration had “requested that Kyiv not strike Moscow, St. Petersburg, and northern regions of Russia with its long range missiles and drones on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday when the U.S. would send a plane carrying a senior-level official to the Russian capital,” citing “people familiar with the request.”

“Ukraine agreed, they said,” Miller added. “Today we see that a U.S. Air Force C-17 plane has landed in Moscow.”

Breitbart News’s Oliver JJ Lane reported that a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III was reported to have flown “from the capital of NATO-member Latvia to an airport near Moscow, Russia on Tuesday morning”:

A U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III flew from the capital of NATO-member Latvia to an airport near Moscow, Russia on Tuesday morning. The military jet first flew on Sunday from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C., reports France’s Le Figaro, citing the open source transponder data which is collected by hobbyist ground-based receivers and aggregated through services such as the Flight Radar app.

Military flights are not obliged to keep their transponders on, but it is best practice to do so for the sake of other flights in the area and air traffic control for the sake of safety. The decision to keep the transponders broadcasting over Russian airspace betrays a desire to make the flight as visible and easily identifiable as possible.

CBS News’s Senior White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs reported in a post on X that Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Ratcliffe was reported to have “traveled to Russia aboard a C-17 for meetings in Moscow today.”

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A Law That the People It Targets Can Defeat With a Felt-Tip Pen

The Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill was introduced on 24 August 2026 – the very day I arrived back in New Zealand after nearly a month away.

Readers of “A Halflings View” will be well aware of my views about bans or restrictions on access to social media platform by the young. Although the news media have trumpeted the present proposals as a “ban” it is not. It actually constitutes a form of limited restriction.

This article is very much a “first impression” view of the Bill. Much of the material and commentary is gathered from earlier writings I have produced on the subject as well as from other sources among them Ani O’Brien, “Thought Crimes” (Substack) — “Hear me out: Ban the hardware not the software”; the New Zealand Initiative; Privacy Commissioner Michael Webster; UNICEF Aotearoa (Susan Glasgow); Australia’s eSafety Commissioner three-month evaluation (July 2026); UK Ofcom/House of Lords material and reporting on the Online Safety Act; and US litigation (NetChoice; the Louisiana and Arkansas decisions).

Furthermore, this article (and indeed the Bill itself) will not be the final word.

The Bill has not yet had its First Reading and that is unlikely before Parliament rises. But Prime Minister Luxon and Erica Stanford were determined to push this ill-advised proposal ahead at pace, even although what it really amounts to is an announcement until the Bill has its First Reading. And it may even fall at that fence. If it makes it, Select Committee submissions and further commentary will accumulate quickly.

Hence the critique reflects the position as at the time of publication of this article.

What the Bill actually does

The Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill, introduced to Parliament on 24 August 2026 by Education Minister Erica Stanford, is a stand-alone statute built on two load-bearing duties.

The first (clause 11) requires operators of “age-restricted platforms” to take reasonable steps to stop New Zealanders under 16 from holding an account. The second (clause 14) requires those operators to produce an annual, written child safety risk assessment covering all under-18s who use the platform.

Behind these sit an enforcement apparatus of warnings, enforceable undertakings, corrective notices, tiered pecuniary penalties (up to the greater of NZ$40 million or 10% of global turnover), and, as a last resort, service restriction orders and access restriction orders that would conscript ISPs, app stores and ancillary providers into preventing access to the platform from New Zealand.

The regulator is the Secretary of Internal Affairs — the chief executive of the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA). More on this disturbing aspect later.

Much of the drafting is careful.

It regulates the account, not the child, so no penalty falls on minors or parents.

It explicitly forbids treating manual date-of-birth entry as a “reasonable step”.

It goes beyond the Privacy Act by requiring destruction of age-assurance data.

The Bill is also more sophisticated than the “ban” it is marketed as. As I have argued on earlier occasions about similar proposals, this is a set of managed restrictions on account-holding, not a prohibition on children seeing content. Publicly available material remains reachable.

But the care in the drafting cannot rescue the concept.

The Bill imports a policy model that has already been trialled next door in Australia and in Britain, and the trials are in.

What follows is the case against it — a case now supported by a striking amount of hard evidence rather than speculation — followed by the specific problem of handing the whole scheme to the DIA.

The central flaw: a “targeted” measure that touches everyone

The Bill’s rhetorical appeal rests on the idea that it targets under-16s. Its mechanism does not.

To reliably prevent a 15-year-old from holding an account, a platform must satisfy itself about the age of every account-holder — which in practice means age-assuring the entire adult population as well.

Privacy Commissioner Michael Webster made the point bluntly when the policy was first floated. Keeping under-16s out means everyone over 16 has to prove they are over 16. The New Zealand Initiative put it the same way — everyone will have to demonstrate they are not under sixteen, including you.

This is the paradox the Bill never resolves, and it is not a drafting quibble but the whole problem.

Clause 11 forbids the “cheap check” (a manual date of birth entry) and forbids relying solely on formal ID or a digital identity service, which forces platforms toward either document upload, facial age-estimation, or “age inference” from behavioural and device signals.

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Why Iran Ruffles the Feathers of the United States

Strip away the diplomatic briefings, Congressional hearings and the endless cable news loops about centrifuges, regional proxies and cyber attacks, and you hit a raw unvarnished nerve.

What truly disturbs the United States about the Islamic Republic is not its policies, its rhetoric or even its nuclear ambitions.  It is Iran’s audacity to exist completely outside the American orbit; and make it work.

When diplomatic pretenses are scrapped, we see that a major power does not spend billions of dollars, conduct regional wars and upend global markets out of pure legalistic devotion to global rules or nonproliferation treaties.

The conflict with the United States, is not about what Iran has in its centrifuges.  Rather, it is about what Tehran represents to a hegemon that refuses to accept  “no” and cannot tolerate a world not under its control.

If the mere possession of enriched uranium or atomic warheads was the ultimate redline, the outline of America’s animosities would look entirely different.

The “crossing the nuclear threshold” explanation collapses under the weight of obvious global contradictions.  Washington, for example, has found ways to coexist, cooperate or outright partner with other nuclear-armed nations; from historical accommodations with Pakistan and India, to winking at Israel’s undeclared arsenal, and managing a pragmatic, albeit tense, approach to China and North Korea.

In the vocabulary of global superpowers, compliance is currency.  Washington tolerates fierce enemies if they eventually capitulate; and it accommodates brutal allies if they submit to American domination.  What empire dreads most is an uncooperative self-reliant country that refuses to bend the knee, yet stubbornly survives after decades of total economic siege.

The real reason Iran gets under the skin of the American foreign policy establishment, and why it has become its main target, has little to do with atoms, and everything to do with sovereignty, geography and the architecture of U.S. hegemony.

For decades, the unwritten rule of the post-Cold War order was simple: align with the U.S.-led global order, or be excluded and isolated.  Most nations that initially balked had little choice but to integrate, bound by the weight of a dollar-dominated global economy.   Difficult states were either absorbed or efforts were made to bring them into client-state relationships, or they are heavily monitored.

In 1979, Iran did the unforgivable.  It rebelled and institutionalized a successful, unapologetic ideological revolution that expressly rejected U.S.-Israeli hegemony, and built an enduring political structure explicitly rooted in anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism. It proudly declared that a Middle Eastern state could chart its own destiny outside the Western framework.

Since then, generations of U.S. policymakers have convinced themselves that crushing economic sanctions, diplomatic excommunication, assassinations and covert sabotage would inevitably lead to a popular implosion or “regime” collapse.

Washington’s frustration has only deepened because its strategy has not worked.

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Bluetooth Glitch Exposes Alibaba’s Secret Tracking Of Users, Developer Says

A San Francisco-based developer discovered that Alibaba Group’s AliExpress marketplace secretly hijacked his computer’s audio system through hidden browser scripts, allowing the website to run inaudible sound waves at zero volume to create “fingerprints” used to track devices without relying on cookies. 

The privacy-focused Brave browser revealed in a series of X posts that the AliExpress marketplace was keeping the developer’s computer audio system active through hidden browser scripts, potentially allowing the website to generate a unique identifier for his device.

The issue emerged when the developer’s Bluetooth headphones refused to transfer their audio connection from his computer to his phone while AliExpress was open. A deeper dive of the website’s code showed background scripts maintaining access to the computer’s audio-processing system without producing audible sound.

The scripts allegedly used the browser’s Web Audio API to process signals at zero volume. Small differences in how individual computers handle those signals can be measured and combined into an “audio fingerprint,” allowing websites to recognize devices even when cookies are deleted or blocked.

The developer also found that the scripts collected other device characteristics, including available memory, screen dimensions, and network information.

Here’s what Brave found:

1. Alibaba’s AliExpress was caught using users’ audio systems to track them. AliExpress wasn’t recording users but instead playing a silent sound and measuring how users’ specific devices processed it in order to fingerprint them.

2. Fingerprinting is a way that websites can identify you without cookies. Sites will note details about your device like your screen size or installed fonts. These details are then combined into a unique, persistent “fingerprint” that can be used to track you across the Web.

3. There are slight variations in how each device plays the same audio file due to differences in CPU, sound card, browser, etc. When AliExpress played the silent sound, it measured these small variations to help build fingerprints of users’ devices.

4. This tracking was discovered due to an unexpected side effect. A user with Bluetooth headphones noticed they couldn’t play music on their phone because the headphones were instead playing AliExpress’s silent sound from their PC.

Brave turned what it found into a sales pitch for its browser:

1. For 6+ years, Brave has protected users against audio fingerprinting, and other fingerprinting types, by default. Brave injects random data into the browser’s output so you show a different fingerprint to different sites. This fingerprint also resets across sessions.

2. Trackers are constantly finding new ways to fingerprint your device, so Brave keeps adding new protections. We recently added defenses against GPU fingerprinting, which stops sites from identifying you with your graphics card or drivers.

The findings raise new questions about browser fingerprinting, a stealthy way that uses silent audio processing for covert tracking. 

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Supreme Court hands Trump a win in bid to prevent ineligible voters voting in midterm elections

The Supreme Court on Monday opened the door for President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at securing the upcoming midterm elections from ineligible voters and implementing verification standards for mail-in ballots. 

The high court halted a lower court ruling that was blocking the president’s March 31 executive order establishing a whole-of-government approach to prevent noncitizens from registering to vote or voting in federal elections. A coalition of 23 Democratic states and Washington, D.C., sued the administration in Massachusetts to block the order. 

The lower court’s ruling by District Court Judge Indira Talwani in June specifically blocked parts of the executive order directing federal prosecutors to focus on prosecuting any state and local officials who facilitate ineligible voting and instructing the U.S. Postal Service to establish verification standards for mail-in ballots, including a unique barcode. 

While the Supreme Court’s August 24 decision lifts the injunction in California v. Trump, the lawsuit brought by a coalition of 23 states and D.C., the administration still faces a separate nationwide legal barrier. 

A second, active preliminary injunction issued by Judge Talwani in August in League of Women Voters of Massachusetts v. Trump continues to block the Postal Service from implementing the changes mandated by the executive order for the upcoming election. 

So, while the Supreme Court has cleared the path for the administration to proceed with certain aspects of the order, significant legal hurdles remain regarding the Postal Service’s implementation before the November midterm elections.

The executive order directed the Department of Homeland Security to create a nationwide list of adult U.S. citizens and the USPS to obtain lists of registered voters. The USPS, an independent agency of the executive branch, would then be required to send mail-in ballots only to individuals on both of those lists.  

The Supreme Court’s conservative justices determined, however, that the District Court “lacked jurisdiction to enter the judgment” and that the stay on the executive order does harm to the government’s legitimate functions of rulemaking and executive prosecutorial discretion, according to the high court’s per curiam opinion published Monday.   

The ruling allows the Trump administration to proceed with its two-pronged effort, through the Postal Service, to ensure that no non-eligible voters cast votes in the upcoming midterms and, through the Justice Department, that those who facilitate such alleged illegal voting will be pursued by prosecutors. 

Since early absentee voting in many states is just weeks away, the Trump administration would have to move quickly to implement the order’s provisions, which could still face further legal challenges. 

As the midterms approach, President Trump has aimed to ensure that no ineligible voters cast votes. In recent months, emerging evidence shows that potentially hundreds of thousands of noncitizens are registered to vote across the country and some have voted in recent elections. 

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AG Blanche’s Warning Points Straight at Age Verification Checks

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has managed to extract $400 million from TikTok, and this is not a story about the company being forced to change its ways – but pay up nonetheless.

The settlement, which means no admission of wrongdoing on the part of TikTok, will see the company pay $300 million now, and another $100 million once a prior consent decree is vacated.

That earlier decree came from a 2019 case, United States v. Musical.ly, an app that was later folded into TikTok. The current case, United States v. ByteDance, was filed in 2024 and is now dismissed with prejudice.

The original complaint accused ByteDance of violating the COPPA Rule by letting children slip past TikTok’s age gate and “knowingly creating accounts for children and collecting data from those children” without “verifiable parental consent.”

The 2019 consent decree also sought to ensure that the company would get “verifiable parental consent” before collecting personal information from children.

The settlement reached now requires TikTok to change absolutely nothing.

The DOJ explains this by saying that since the 2024 filing, TikTok “has undergone significant changes to its ownership, management, compliance functions, and privacy practices” and “implemented extensive measures designed to strengthen safeguards for younger users, improve age-related controls, and enhance parental oversight.”

Those changes “have materially advanced the public interests underlying the Department’s litigation and have strengthened protections for millions of American families,” the DOJ said.

And what is “verifiable parental consent” that’s the main aspect of the original complaint and the 2019 consent decree? That’s where things get interesting. COPPA doesn’t mandate any specific method, but lists several, which escalate quickly from a signed consent form, to a payment from a parent’s credit or debit card, to submitting a government-issued ID and matching it to a face scan, or being verified over video call.

In other words, proving that a parent has given consent tends to boil down to proving who everyone is.

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Leftist Obama Judge Indira Talwani Goes Completely ROGUE – Spits in the Face of the Supreme Court and Rules Trump’s U.S. Postal Service is in “Complete Noncompliance” With Her Block on Mail-In Ballot Security Rules

Obama-appointed U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani escalated her war against President Donald Trump’s election-integrity agenda Tuesday, declaring that the U.S. Postal Service violated her nationwide injunction by completing new security regulations for federal mail-in ballots.

Just one day after the United States Supreme Court UPHELD, for now, President Trump’s executive order and the new U.S. Postal Service rules designed to secure America’s mail-in ballots, this Obama-appointed radical in Boston just ruled that Trump’s Postal Service has VIOLATED her earlier injunction.

She’s going off. Aggressively. Accusing the Trump team of “complete noncompliance.”

This is pure judicial warfare against the American people and against free and fair elections.

Talwani’s nationwide injunction (entered earlier this month in League of Women Voters of Massachusetts v. Trump) explicitly barred the USPS Defendants “from implementing, giving effect to, or enforcing Section 3 of Executive Order No. 14399… or otherwise initiating or completing rulemaking to promulgate the specific regulations outlined in Section 3(b)(i)-(v) or (d) of the EO for the November 3, 2026 or any earlier election.”

On Friday evening, August 21, the USPS completed the rulemaking process. They sent a Final Rule titled “Ballot Mail for Federal Elections” to the Office of the Federal Register, with an immediate effective date of August 21 and publication set for August 26.

The Final Rule itself nods to the injunctions and states the Postal Service “will not take actions to implement the rule specifically for the 2026 election unless and until the government obtains relief from those injunctions.”

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Pharmacists sound alarm over popular drugs used for weight loss: Users ‘look like chemo patients’

Drugs prescribed for diabetes and chronic obesity such as Ozempic are increasingly sought after for quick, cosmetic weight loss, a life choice pharmacists warn can lead to serious health risks. 

“We have seen thin people try to come in and get it,” Dr. Carrie Leske, a licensed pharmacist in Minnesota, recently told Just the News. “As pharmacists we are supposed to use our judgment and, if need be, call the physician and try to understand what’s going on, because it’s supposed to only be used for obese people.”

Such prescription medications, known under such popular brand names as Ozempic and Wegovy, are a class of drugs known as Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (or GLP-1s) that mimic a natural hormone to lower blood sugar and reduce appetite. Two types of GLP-1s – semaglutide and tirzepatide – are found in such medications. 

However, they were not created for weight loss in people already at healthy weights. So taking it off-label brings such serious medical risks as severe dehydration, muscle loss and pancreatitis.

“Some of the people using [these] just look so unhealthy,” Leske, also told Just the News. “They look like chemo patients to me.”

Dr. Nairi Kasparian, a clinical pharmacist in Omaha, told Just the News that while GLP-1s can be “very effective,” they are designed for continual, indefinite use as long-term weight management – not necessarily as a temporary weight loss pill.

“They are FDA-approved as chronic weight-management treatments, meaning the goal is generally to continue them as long as they are providing benefit and are tolerated,” she said. 

“The biggest issue is when people stop taking the drug,” said Kasparian, while also pointing out “current obesity-treatment guidance notes that stopping semaglutide or tirzepatide abruptly can result in regaining roughly half to two-thirds of the weight lost within a year” – particularly if the individual has not maintained a strict diet.

Nevertheless, the efficacy of the medications in curbing appetite and delivering speedy results has gained the attention of otherwise healthy individuals seeking short-term, cosmetic weight loss.

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Court Backs DMCA Takedown of Public Meeting Videos

The US copyright system is often used as a tool of censorship, and a recent court ruling shows that there is little to stop this from happening.

The way the system is set up, it provides a powerful tool for anyone to unceremoniously remove content from the internet, with no questions asked. At least not initially.

That tool is the DMCA takedown notice, and the law that underpins it, and the whole system, is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). One of its sections, 512(f), is meant to deter abuse of this process, but as the court decision shows, it is toothless.

The case concerns a local news outlet in Massachusetts that had its YouTube channel taken down because of videos it posted about local government meetings.

The city of Waltham had outsourced the recording of its meetings to a contractor, Waltham Community Access Corporation (WCAC), and it was this entity that sent the DMCA notices to YouTube, targeting 15 videos on the Channel 781 News outlet.

This resulted in YouTube temporarily deactivating the channel.

But the court found that WCAC had done nothing wrong, and that its consideration of the fair use doctrine was sufficient, even though it was minimal.

The court’s decision was to grant summary judgment to WCAC and dismiss the claim that the takedowns were a misrepresentation under Section 512(f) of the DMCA.

We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.

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