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.

CHA-CHING! Financial Filings Reveal MASSIVE Grift at the Obama Foundation

Newly released financial filings reveal that there are a lot of people making an absolute fortune off the Obama Foundation. Anyone who remembers the massive grift at the Clinton Foundation might feel like they’re taking a walk down memory lane.

Valerie Jarrett, a former Obama White House player who was central to his presidency, was making a cool $740,000 per year running the foundation. That’s more than the President of the United States makes in a year.

Other figures were also pulling in huge six-figure salaries and the number of employees has ballooned to more than 300 people.

Obama has become an industry unto himself and everyone in his orbit is cashing in, big time.

FOX News reports:

Valerie Jarrett earned $740K as Obama insiders filled top roles during $850M presidential center build

As construction nears completion on the long-delayed $850 million Obama Presidential Center, federal tax filings show the Obama Foundation paid CEO Valerie Jarrett $740,000 in 2024 while several former Obama White House officials collected six-figure salaries as foundation executives.

The Obama Foundation — which will operate the 19.3-acre center on publicly owned Chicago parkland — paid its CEO more than any other major presidential foundation. Salaries and benefits soared from $18.5 million in 2018 to $43.7 million in 2024, as staffing expanded to 337 employees and annual revenue reached nearly $210 million.

Jarrett, one of the Obamas’ closest advisors, took over as CEO in 2021 and is among six of the foundation’s 10 highest-paid executives who previously held senior roles in the Obama administration or campaign, according to a review of the foundation’s tax filings from 2018 to 2024.

“Illinois Democrats are truly living their best lives — making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to help design the ugliest building in Chicago,” Illinois GOP Chairman Kathy Salvi told Fox News. “Their jaw-dropping salaries prove that Illinois’ culture of corruption is alive and well as Barack Obama’s top allies rake in the cash.”

Despite all of this heavy spending, the new Obama Center is looking for volunteers.

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TDF sounds alarm over imminent passage of Bill C-9

Proposed “Combatting Hate Act” expands the legal definition of hatred and removes key free expression safeguards in the Criminal Code.

The House of Commons has closed debate on Bill C-9, the “Combatting Hate Act.” The Bill expands and codifies the definition of “hatred,” departing from the Supreme Court’s strict requirement of “vilification and detestation.” It removes the longstanding good faith religious speech protections for sincerely held religious opinions and expressions based on religious texts in the Criminal Code and eliminates the requirement for Attorney General consent before charging individuals with certain hate crime offences. The Bill also creates a new offence that applies when an underlying offence—even a non-criminal one—is motivated by hatred, potentially doubling the penalties for the underlying act.

The Bill has faced opposition from civil liberties groups and religious organizations. TDF was invited to testify before the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights and filed a brief outlining its serious misgivings. 

“Ironically, the government has moved to end debate on issues of public concern for a bill that would end debate on issues of public concern. The Bill empowers prosecutors to bring charges based on the merest suggestion that the impugned conduct is motivated by an ill-defined concept of “hatred,” massively increasing potential jail time and legal jeopardy for defendants. In our experience, these types of offences tend to be laid against marginalized and working-class people rather than powerful elites and political insiders. However, all Canadians can expect greater digital censorship and increased online police surveillance if the Bill becomes law. We only have to look at the UK example, where police make approximately 12,000 annual arrests for online “hate incidents” under similar legislation.” 

The Bill now moves to a vote at the justice committee. After that, it will proceed to the report stage and third reading before advancing to the Senate.

TDF will continue to oppose the Bill and all attempts by the government to censor Canadians.

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Hegseth vows US will ‘go as far as we need’ to topple Iranian regime as conflict escalates — including possible ‘boots on ground’

War Secretary Pete Hegseth vowed he and President Trump will do whatever it takes to topple the Iranian regime — and didn’t rule out sending US ground troops into Tehran as Operation Epic Fury rages on.

“We’re willing to go as far as we need in order to be successful,” Hegseth told CBS News’ Major Garrett during a “60 Minutes” sit-down interview that aired Sunday night.

“We reserve the right. We would be completely unwise if we did not reserve the right to take any particular option, whether it included boots on the ground or not boots on the ground.”

Trump told The Post last week that US forces could be sent into Iran if that is deemed necessary.

Hegseth told Garrett that if a decision is made to deploy American troops — whether overtly or covertly — to the Middle East, it wouldn’t be shared publicly with the press.

“People ask, ‘Boots on the ground, no boots on the ground, four weeks, two weeks, six weeks? Go in, go in,’” he added.

“President Trump knows — I know — you don’t tell the enemy, you don’t tell the press, you don’t tell anybody what your limits would be on an operation.”

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Missile Fragment From Iran School Massacre Marked ‘Made in USA’ – But Trump Keeps Lying

As Iranian officials displayed US-marked fragments of a missile believed to have been used in Saturday’s massacre of around 175 mostly school children in Minab, President Donald Trump on Monday doubled down on his unfounded claim that Iran carried out the strike.

The president suggested during a press conference at his Trump National Doral Miami resort that Iran may have used a US Tomahawk missile to carry out the February 28 attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab.

Trump falsely claimed that Iran has “some” of the highly restricted cruise missiles after one of them was recorded hitting an Iranian military facility near the school just after Saturday’s strike there.

“A Tomahawk is very generic,” Trump added. “It’s sold to other countries.”

New York Times reporter Shawn McCreesh pressed Trump on his claim, asking, “You just suggested that Iran somehow got its hands on a Tomahawk and bombed its own elementary school on the first day of the war… Why are you the only person saying this?”

Trump replied: “Because I just don’t know enough about it. I think it’s something that I was told is under investigation, but Tomahawks are, are used by others. As you know, numerous other nations have Tomahawks. They buy them from us.”

Iran has no Tomahawks, which are not “generic.” Originally developed by General Dynamics and now manufactured by Raytheon, the BGM‑109 Tomahawk is a specific long-range cruise missile designed and produced in the United States. Only two other countries – Australia and the United Kingdom—are known to have Tomahawks in their arsenals, although Japan and the Netherlands have also agreed to buy them.

The US also does not sell weaponry to the Iranian government – with the extraordinary exception of the Iran-Contra Affair, in which the Reagan administration secretly sold arms to Iran in order to fund anti-communist Contra terrorists in Nicaragua.

Trump’s Monday remarks followed his Saturday comments to reporters aboard Air Force One, where he said that the bombing “was done by Iran.”

However, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was accompanying Trump, notably declined to back Trump’s claim, saying only that “we’re certainly investigating” the strike.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Michael Waltz also did not endorse the president’s assertion, telling ABC News’ Martha Raddatz Sunday that he would “leave that to the investigators to determine.”

Waltz – a former Army Special Forces officer who served in Afghanistan – also told NBC News’ Meet the Press Sunday that “we never deliberately attack civilians.”

More than 400,000 civilians in over half a dozen countries have been killed in US-led wars since 9/11, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

Hundreds of Iranian civilians have been killed by US and Israeli bombing since February 28. Israeli airstrikes have also killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians during the same period.

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Israel’s Greatest Weapon Was Fear – And It Is Now Failing

Israel’s war on Iran reveals a deeper crisis: the collapse of a psychological doctrine built on fear and invincibility.

Origins of Israel’s Psychological Warfare

Wars are rarely fought only on battlefields. They are also fought in the minds of societies, in the perception of power and vulnerability, and in the political imagination of entire regions. Israel understood this principle early in its history, and psychological dominance became a central component of its military doctrine.

From the earliest years of the Zionist project, the idea that power must appear overwhelming was openly articulated. In 1923, the Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in his famous essay The Iron Wall that Zionism would only succeed once the indigenous population became convinced that resistance was hopeless. Only when Palestinians realized they could not defeat the Zionist project, he argued, would they accept its permanence.

The events surrounding the Nakba of 1947–48 reflected this logic. Between 800,000 and 900,000 Palestinians were expelled or forced to flee their homes, as hundreds of villages were destroyed or depopulated. The expulsions occurred through a combination of direct military assault, forced displacement, and the collapse of Palestinian society under war.

Massacres played a crucial role in spreading fear. The killings at Deir Yassin in April 1948, in which more than one hundred civilians were killed by Zionist militias, quickly reverberated across Palestine. But Deir Yassin was only one among many massacres that occurred during that period. Killings in places such as Lydda, Tantura, Safsaf, and numerous other villages contributed to a climate of terror that accelerated the depopulation of Palestinian communities.

The psychological impact of these events was enormous. News of massacres spread from village to village, convincing many Palestinians that remaining in their homes meant risking annihilation. The lesson was clear: war could function not only as a tool of conquest but as an instrument of psychological domination.

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And the Next President of Venezuela Will Be…

On Monday, after hosting the historic first Shield of the Americas Summit in Doral, Fla., Donald Trump stopped by a Venezuelan restaurant, El Arepazo, on his way to the airport to fly back to Washington, D.C. He was greeted with cheers and applause and chants of “Trump!” and “USA!” The crowd loved him, as they often do during these types of appearances, but this one was, potentially, a bit more meaningful.

Sometimes referred to as “Dorazuela,” the city of Doral has one of the largest Venezuelan diaspora communities in the United States. The president owns a hotel here — it’s where the summit, which was focused largely on rallying like-minded Latin American leaders to come together in the name of regional security and combating the cartels that plague every country in the Western Hemisphere, took place just days before. 

At the restaurant, Trump shook hands, chatted with staff and patrons, and even took some Venezuelan food back on the plane for his staff. Those who were there said it was one of the warmest political appearances they’ve ever seen, which doesn’t surprise me. Whether they live in Doral or Caracas or somewhere else in the world, the Venezuelan people love Donald Trump. On January 3, he did more for that country than almost anyone else probably ever has.  

But the language he uses leaves many wary and understandably so. The constant praise of Delcy Rodríguez and saying she’s doing a good job is tough to hear when you know that she’s just as bad and every bit as much as corrupt as Nicolás Maduro was. She’s a communist by birth and was radicalized even further when her Marxist father died in police custody after being arrested for kidnapping a business executive from the United States. After his death, she vowed to go into politics as her own form of personal vengeance.  

“Delcy Rodríguez knows how to present herself as a ‘moderate,'” Venezuelan opposition-aligned lawyer Estrella Infante told me earlier this year. “That is why she has always handled international negotiations. She has extensive global connections, and many actors prefer her continuity because it protects their interests. That is her power.” (For what it’s worth, those global connections are largely our adversaries — Iran, China, Russia, Cuba, etc.)  

The thing is, Delcy has a little help with maintaining her “moderate” reputation, and it comes from the United States. If it’s not the New York Times literally calling her a “moderate” and writing a glowing review of what a great leader she’d be, it’s what Venezuelan lawyer and writer Emmanuel Rincón calls the “hidden lobby war against Venezuela’s democratic transition.”   

In a recent op-ed in the Washington Times, Rincón asserts, “Alongside the brave men and women who genuinely fight to end the socialist dictatorship, there has emerged a growing ecosystem of false opposition figures, fake activists, opportunistic lobbyists and self-proclaimed ‘conservatives’ who have found a way to profit from Venezuela’s tragedy.”  

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Trump’s lies reveal the real story about the Iran war

A recent poll in the U.S. concluded that Donald Trump tells the truth only about 3 percent of the time during his public announcements at press conferences. Perhaps it was his stint at being a celebrity on TV that taught him how gullible people in America are when fed the most fanciful, moronic lies a leading figure can tell, through the American media. Of course, it’s also about the journalists as well, and if there’s one thing that the Trump administrations have taught us, it is how poor the general level of journalism is in America these days. American journalists are not afraid to ask difficult questions or disbelieve what they are told. They simply don’t know how to do this in the first place.

Covering the Iran war, it is breathtaking, some of the brazen lies he tells while being questioned by journalists who are complicit in his dirty work. The mere idea that Iran, for example, acquired a Tomahawk missile and used it to kill its own schoolgirls is beyond absurd. How could journalists not question such a reply when it is so clear that Trump is lying through his teeth?

Because of this lying, we can see how Trump works, though. Unlike other U.S. presidents who have some shame and discomfort in lying to the press, Trump suffers no such handicap and so can take on bolder, more daring ventures on the global stage. In this environment, there is no respect for international law or even due process within the political framework of how Congress works. Trump hasn’t worked out how to defeat Iran, but he has all the contingent narratives to lay out afterwards to explain why everything that goes wrong is not his fault. We see that he is already preparing himself for the day of judgement by the press pack in the coming days and weeks by telling them that it was Jared Kushner, Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff who told him to hit Iran.

The direction towards these three is revealing. Of course, we have learned the simple rule of Trump when it comes to decisions. When things go well, everything was his decision; when things go badly, blame others.

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AI Won’t Fix America’s Looming Debt Crisis

Last month, Congress sparred with the president over a partial budget, but with few real cuts, America’s slow march toward an epic debt crisis went on undeterred. With over $38 trillion in debt and interest payments exceeding defense or Medicare spending, one would expect lawmakers to confront reality and do the difficult work needed to restore fiscal sanity. But why would they? Cutting entitlements and increasing middle-class taxes rarely make for winning campaign slogans.

It’s no surprise, then, that some prefer to pin their hopes on AI as America’s fiscal savior. Vanguard’s chief economist Joe Davis argued there’s as high as a 50 percent chance AI will prevent a debt-driven economic malaise. Elon Musk voiced a similar conclusion late last year, claiming AI and robotics are “the only thing that’s going to solve the US debt crisis.”

The argument goes like this: an AI boom drives explosive economic growth and tax revenue, while, at the same time, productivity gains impressively offset any upward pressure on interest rates. The deficit becomes a surplus and the overall debt shrinks, possibly disappearing entirely.

If that sounds less like a policy plan and more like a retirement strategy built around winning the lottery, you’re not wrong. The entire scenario hinges on a massive if: that AI generates extraordinary revenue and does it quickly enough to outrun rising interest costs.

But even if the government hits the tax revenue jackpot before Congress drives us off a fiscal cliff, it would be naïve to assume lawmakers would pay down the debt. 

The More the Government Gets, the More the Government Spends

For the sake of argument, suppose the tech optimists are right, and the federal government enjoys a massive AI-driven revenue windfall. Understanding what happens next requires understanding the incentives of politicians and their voters.

This is where public choice shines. Rather than assuming politicians and voters act in everyone’s best interest, this branch of economics recognizes that people don’t become angels once they interface with the government. Incentives matter, especially for politicians.

Incentives are why we have a deficit in the first place. The public isn’t particularly interested in financial restraint because high spending and low taxes benefit them now, and the resulting debt is some future generation’s problem. Politicians surely see the crisis brewing, but solving it is a sure way to get voted out of office. And so the incentive is to run constant deficits and grow the debt year after year, decade after decade.

Without changing incentives, it will be hard to avoid spending new revenue. Ballooning coffers mean voters will demand that the government dole out more goodies (especially if AI displaces workers along the way). Washington already excels at entertaining expensive ideas: healthcare subsidies for well-off families, a universal basic income, generous tax cuts, a fifty-percent increase in military spending, all despite the pushback the current deficit’s able to muster. Imagine the wish list after it drops even a little.

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UK Councils Tell Schools: Children’s DRAWINGS Could Be Blasphemous Under Islamic Law

In yet another assault on free expression in British classrooms, schools are being instructed by Labour councils to treat kids’ innocent drawings as potential offenses under Islamic interpretations. 

Guidelines warn that depicting humans or prophets could spark blasphemy complaints, forcing teachers to tiptoe around religious sensitivities at the expense of creativity and open education. 

The push comes amid a broader Labour government drive to monitor and suppress any perceived slights against Muslims, turning schools into surveillance outposts rather than places of learning.

The guidance, titled “Sharing the Journey,” originates from northern Labour councils like Leeds, Calderdale, Oldham, and Wakefield, and has been adopted by others including Sefton and Tameside. It explicitly states that “for some Muslim parents, sensitivities may exist in connection with the teaching of aspects of art, dance, drama, music, physical education, religious education and RSHE”.

Teachers are advised: “It is very important that the school understands this and is also careful not to ask its students to reproduce images of Jesus, the Prophet Mohammed or other figures considered to be prophets in Islam. Some Muslim pupils may not wish to draw the human figure.” This stems from hadith interpretations prohibiting images of living beings, viewed as idolatrous by some sects.

The restrictions don’t stop at art. On music, the document notes: “in Islam, music is traditionally limited to the human voice and non-tuneable percussion instruments as in the days of the Prophet, when they were only used in marriage ceremonies and on the battlefield”. It adds that “schools should listen to any concerns, discuss the place of music in the curriculum and ensure that students are not asked to join in songs that conflict with their religious beliefs”. 

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Georgia Legislature Can’t Vote For Clean Elections, But Has Time To Change The State Flower

The Georgia Senate has passed a bill to change the state flower from the Cherokee rose to the sweetbay magnolia.

The sweetbay magnolia is native to Georgia, while the Cherokee rose is not.

“The Cherokee Rose was adopted as the state flower in 1916 under the incorrect assumption that it was native to the state and also a legacy of the Cherokee people,” Rep. Deborah Silcox, who carried the bill in the House, said. “It is neither.”

“While the Cherokee Rose is not sold or encouraged as a landscaping plant because of its invasive tendencies, the Sweetbay Magnolia is widely available and can be planted in all regions of the state,” the Georgia Native Plant Society said, reported WRDW.

The vote comes on the heels of the legislature refusing to vote for paper ballots for the November election. Georgia is well known for its corrupt elections that are influenced by voting machines, dirty voter rolls, and illegal immigrants.

Georgia senators shot down a bill that would have switched the state’s voting method to paper ballots filled out by hand before this November’s elections.

The bill’s defeat sets up a scramble for Georgia lawmakers to find a way to remove computer QR codes from ballots this year, as required by a state law passed two years ago, reported WABE.

The Senate voted 27-21 on the bill, two votes short of the majority needed for legislation to pass in the 56-member Senate. Seven senators skipped the vote following warnings of election “chaos” if it passed.

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