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.

The Left Seems to be Waking Up to Racist Gun Control Laws

What does one’s race have to do with one’s right to keep and bear arms? Well, nothing. The Second Amendment covers all American citizens and legal immigrants. Asking race is, at most, an identifier to help differentiate a black John Smith from a white one, and that’s about it.

Unfortunately for us all, that wasn’t how many people viewed it back in the day. They thought anyone who wasn’t white was someone who needed to be disarmed. Whether it was because they didn’t want to be overthrown or they just thought non-whites (and Catholics, for some reason) were particularly dangerous isn’t relevant. The truth was, they did.

Luckily, we’re more enlightened these days, right?

Not really.

We’ve talked a fair bit about the issues in New Jersey, particularly with racial disparity in permit issuance. Our own John Petrolino, who unfortunately lives there, has done a lot of work bringing this issue to light.

But let’s be real here. None of the people who need to be outraged are probably reading pro-gun sits like Bearing Arms. They’re reading Slate, and what are the odds of Slate covering this?

Well, better than I thought they were. Aymann Ismail’s firsthand account of the exhausting process of becoming a New Jersey gun owner may be eye-opening to the website’s more progressive readers. 

So in 2020, I applied for a Firearm Purchaser Identification, a permit to purchase a firearm that is required in New Jersey. After fingerprints, references, application fees, and months of waiting, I was told over the phone that I had no choice but to withdraw my application. The issue was a misdemeanor trespassing charge in New York from my street-photographer days. Under New Jersey law, that should not have disqualified me from owning a gun. I had never been convicted of a felony. No domestic violence charges. No mental health issues. It didn’t matter. The Newark Police Department’s firearm permitting office told me my application was being withdrawn. They insisted they were doing me a favor, and that a denial would bar me from reapplying if I got my record expunged.

Again, I wasn’t even sure I wanted a gun. But the interaction was curious. It didn’t matter that I pointed out I met the legal requirements. Again and again, I was unsuccessful. It had me thinking about who is presumed “safe” to own a gun, and who isn’t. I began speaking with Black and brown gun owners across northern New Jersey, particularly in cities where violence, policing, and race overlap in complicated ways. An Afro-Cuban neighborhood friend I went to high school with in Newark told me he had applied for his own permit and received it in just two weeks. When I explained that I tried multiple times and was still waiting months after my latest application, he looked genuinely confused. Then he asked what race I’d listed on the paperwork. “Other,” I told him. He burst out laughing. “You idiot,” he said. “You’re supposed to put white.”

The more people I spoke to, the more I learned I was far from alone in making that “mistake.” The greater question of who gets to, and should, own a gun turned out to far more complicated than I knew. Few people—on the left or the right—want to talk about it. The ending of my own story helps explain why.

Oh, on this side of the right, we’re more than willing to talk about it. It’s just that no one on the left seems interested in listening.

Now, the author did, finally, get his license and didn’t have to lie about his race on his application, which is good news, but the fact that New Jersey did that in the first place is a major issue. It’s one that does need to be talked about because it clearly illustrates the bright string from the racist gun laws of the old days, and how little has changed.

Here in Georgia, many of our now dead gun control laws could be similarly linked. The prohibition of carrying a firearm at a “public gathering” was a reaction to armed black men and women responding to a violent attack that’s now called the Camilla Massacre. It wasn’t the shooting itself, but the fact that marchers, after being attacked, went home and got their own guns to fight back.

So it’s unsurprising that New Jersey didn’t have a law in place forbidding black gun ownership or concealed carry, but the application wasn’t much different than if they did.

It’s why subjective gun laws are always going to be an issue, and largely an issue for minorities. It’s part of why Bruen stuck them down. Anything that can be misused to cause harm to a particular group–any particular group–will be used or misused to cause harm to some group or another for no reason other than the people impacted are part of that group.

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Boston Public Library to host 19 drag queen story hours for children at branches across the city as part of June Pride Month programming

Mayor Michelle Wu‘s Boston is rolling out the red carpet for tots — with the city’s public library system scheduling 19 drag queen story hours for children at branches across the city in June, as the New Boston Post first reported.

The taxpayer-funded Boston Public Library has booked three performers — Ms. Patty, Just JP, and Rose Quartz — to read picture books and sing songs to kids and families, with Ms. Patty alone headlining an eight-show tour of branches from the West End to Dorchester.

The library is pitching the sessions as a way to “raise awareness of gender diversity” and “build empathy” — buzzwords that have triggered parental-rights groups, religious leaders, and Republicans nationwide, who say drag shows have no business doubling as children’s programming.

Ms. Patty, who is booked for eight Boston Public Library drag story hour sessions across the branches in June.

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San Francisco YMCA bans nudity after trans member exposes himself to women, children

A San Francisco YMCA has implemented new rules after a trans-identified male was seen walking around naked in the locker room in front of women and children, as well as allegedly harassing female members.

New rules at the Stonestown Family YMCA stated that “Nudity should be discreet, limited, and brief.” The rule added, “Nudity is permitted only while actively showering. Members are expected to put clothing on or be covered during use of the space outside of showering,” per the Daily Mail.

The new rules continued, “Respect privacy and personal space. Please maintain appropriate distance from others, be mindful of personal space during times of undress, and demonstrate courtesy at all times.” 

Also among the new rules are that hair dryers should be used “for drying head hair only,” and that children five and younger need to be accompanied by a parent or guardian while using changing rooms for the opposite sex. 

The new rules come after a series of complaints by female YMCA attendees against Sammy, a trans-identified male. Sammy, who had been a regular at the gym since 2024, has reportedly not been seen at the location since the new rules went into effect. 

Elizabeth Kenney, a member of the Berkeley YMCA location that Sammy also attends, recalled to the outlet seeing the male “harassing” an elderly member who had asked him to cover up. The male allegedly told the elderly woman, “If you don’t like the way I look, then you’ve got a sexual problem with yourself.” 

Kenney recalled telling Sammy, “Get away from her, leave her alone. You’re a man, you’d don’t belong here.” Sammy had also been caught on camera by Kenney’s husband, Travis, claiming to a YMCA staffer that a “drunk” woman had been lecturing him. 

Anne, who attends the Stonestown YMCA location, filed a police report in March accusing Sammy of harassment. She said that after blow drying himself while naked, Sammy had walked up to her “very close,” turned around, and used a handheld mirror to stare back at her. 

Anne wrote in the police report, “He used it as if it were a rear-view mirror to look at me behind himself. His eyes caught mine in the mirror and I froze.” She also claimed that Sammy had “paraded” around in front of Anne’s two young children in the locker room.

Elizabeth, another YMCA member, told the outlet that she had felt “repulsed and angry” to see the male “blow drying his entire naked body, including his penis, posed in front of all of the other women.”

Despite the new rules, the YMCA restated that California law allows for people to use the locker room of their self-declared gender identity.

Susan Pete, a 59-year-old member of the YMCA who was a vocal critic of Sammy, told the outlet she hopes he’s gone for good. “The transgender people ruined everything for women. They ruined sports, ruined the locker room, they upset me,” she said. “We’ve been very happy since he’s been gone, but I don’t know if he’s going to come back and cover up, or fight against it. Hopefully he just went to Seattle.”

She also raised concerns about the new rules being impractical. “So what are they going to do – having someone standing around monitoring the situation, saying ‘you’ve been naked too long?’ He’s ruined everything.”

Women Are Real, a Bay Area group defending women’s spaces, wrote in response to the rule changes, “We’ve been working to remove this guy from the women’s locker room for 2 years. He was literally there almost every day for HOURS. It’s a super tiny locker room and he spent hours in it.” 

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US Law Enforcement Warns of ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ as AI Hatred Grows

In the wake of attacks on CEOs, a nationwide protest movement targeting data centers, and increasing concerns about AI job replacement, federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists.

More than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fusion centers obtained by WIRED show a national shift taking place to surveil this new and worryingly broad category of people and activities deemed an emerging threat.

This new effort follows President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and “anti-capitalism” beliefs. Earlier this month, Trump’s counterterrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, released a public counterterrorism strategy claiming that left-wing extremists are one of the three top counterterrorism priorities facing the United States.

Taken together, these Trump administration directives have commandeered the domestic surveillance apparatus to surveil and criminalize speech and assembly that challenges the ideology of the White House. A new focus on anti-technology extremism adds an unreported category to already public designations under a presidency that has heavily invested political and material capital in AI and data center proliferation.

Among the documents in the tranche obtained by WIRED is a New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau report that warns of widespread upheaval in response to AI adoption. Of particular note is a novel term for what the bureau purports to be an emerging extremism threat.

“The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City,” the report reads. The term “anti-tech violent extremism” does not appear in any publicly available DHS or FBI domestic extremism reports or guides and represents a novel grouping of a wide range of ideologies under a single extremist category.

In the same Intelligence Bureau assessment, analysts also describe a novel threat emerging in the wake of the arrest and trial of Ziz Laota, an extreme rationalist who allegedly led a small cultlike group, three members of which have been charged with murder, tied to an obsessive ideology focused on the existential risk posed by AI.

While the Zizian ideology is extremist in nature, a less extreme version of the same fears surrounding the cataclysmic potential of AI are a common concern among AI alignment experts, machine learning engineers, and even frontier AI companies. Nonetheless, the Intelligence Bureau warns that “paranoid views regarding AI” may proliferate in the aftermath of the Zizians’ trial, thanks to their “attempt to reason the belief that a godlike incarnation of AI is imminent,” and belief that “humans must best use their time in the present to devote themselves to ensuring its compliance with human morality, or face existential consequences for failing to do so.”

The NYPD intel assessment follows the department’s collaboration with the FBI last year to monitor the Signal chat of an activist group coordinating volunteers to monitor public hearings at immigration courts in New York. According to documents obtained by The Guardian, the FBI surveilled activists as part of a broader investigation into “anarchist violent extremist actors,” one of the threat categories named in the new counter terrorism strategy.

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Oregon petition to criminalize hunting, fishing reaches signature threshold

Supporters of an effort to criminalize the killing of animals for food in Oregon are one step closer in getting a measure on the November ballot.

Initiative Petition 28 would make it illegal to injure or kill animals and would effectively ban hunting, fishing and the breeding of animals.

Supporters have been collecting signatures for this since 2024 and this past week, they reached the number necessary to make it onto the November ballot.

But it’s not official yet. The Secretary of State’s Office still needs to verify the signatures.

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Why Overdose Deaths Are Falling—and It Isn’t Because of the Drug War

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently reported that overdose deaths during the 12-month period ending in December 2025 declined by 13.9 percent compared to the previous year, reaching a total of 69,973, the overwhelming majority of which were due to fentanyl. While a drop in overdose deaths is welcome news, it is important to keep in mind that the total number of overdose deaths for the year ending in December 2019 was 70,630. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh found that the pre-pandemic trend line had grown exponentially since the late 1970s before the COVID pandemic disrupted that trend with spikes in overdose deaths, substance use, and suicide rates. The new numbers may signal a return to that trend.

Younger Americans Are Using Fewer Drugs

Another factor that may be contributing to the decline in overdose deaths is that younger Americans appear to be using many psychoactive substances less than previous generations. Federally funded surveys, such as the Monitoring the Future survey, have documented substantial long-term declines in adolescent cigarette smoking, alcohol use, and many illicit drugs, while CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey data show major reductions in teen alcohol use and cigarette smoking over the past two decades. Even youth vaping rates have fallen from their 2019 peak, according to the FDA/CDC National Youth Tobacco Survey. 

Researchers increasingly describe Gen Z as engaging in less risk-taking behavior overall than earlier cohorts, including less drinking, smoking, and drug use. While this trend alone probably does not fully explain the recent decline in overdose deaths, particularly since most fatal overdoses occur among adults in their 30s to 50s, it may reduce the number of younger people who progress into the highest-risk patterns of substance use associated with overdose mortality.

As pandemic-era supply chain and transportation disruptions eased, illicit drug markets also have become more diversified. During the pandemic, fentanyl largely displaced heroin in many regions of the country. More recently, some researchers and harm-reduction workers have reported signs that heroin availability has modestly rebounded in certain markets. Because heroin is less potent and generally longer-acting than fentanyl, some opioid users who developed tolerance to fentanyl may prefer heroin when it is available, potentially reducing exposure to the highly concentrated fentanyl products that drove record overdose deaths during the pandemic.

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AI Startup Says It Will Pay People $2,000 A Month to Masturbate… Yes, Really

  • Joi AI is hiring 10 “masturbation consultants” at $2,000 for a month to test an AI-guided masturbation feature and document its effects on stress, sleep, mood, and confidence.
  • The feature uses mood-matched AI voice sessions, and consultants would submit written feedback and questionnaires directly to the company.
  • Joi AI says the campaign is intended to collect product feedback while drawing attention to AI’s growing role in sexual wellness and digital intimacy.

Joi AI says it will pay people $2,000 a month to masturbate. Yes, you read that right.

The AI companion startup is hiring 10 “masturbation consultants” to test a feature called Daily Guided Masturbation, which uses mood-matched AI voice sessions to guide users through the experience. Participants would document how regular use affects stress, sleep quality, mood, and confidence. The four-week role is open to adults 18 and older in the U.S. and the U.K.

“The role is real, and we’ve had great responses since the posting went live,” Joi AI Head of Brand and Communication Julie Levin told Decrypt.

The listing describes ideal candidates as “articulate, observant, and impossible to blush”—people who can describe sensations “better than a sommelier describes a wine.” The posting also promises flexible scheduling, and “the most interesting ‘What do you do for a living?’ answer at any party.”

Joi AI is an online platform that includes AI-generated avatars, voice interactions, and personalized chat experiences built around companionship and intimacy. Joi AI describes the new consultant role as structured product testing tied directly to its new feature.

“The role involves testing and giving feedback on the mood-matched AI voice-guided sessions, and providing feedback on the overall user experience,” Levin told Decrypt.

According to Levin, participants complete guided sessions and submit written questionnaires directly to the Joi AI team. Sample prompts ask whether the voice matched the selected mood, how immersive the session felt, and whether lags or pauses disrupted the experience.

The listing comes as platforms including Replika and Character.AI have built large user bases around AI-driven relationships and conversational experiences. Joi AI operates primarily through its website rather than major app stores. Levin said the company has more than 1 million monthly active users worldwide and millions of interactions each month, but declined to disclose total download figures.

Unlike AI assistants like Alexa or Siri, designed to help with everyday tasks, Joi AI operates in a smaller corner of that market focused on sexual exploration, fantasy, and digital intimacy. The company rebranded from EVA AI in April 2025, during what it described as its first Dating Stress Awareness Day campaign.

“Joi AI is focused on making AI companionship more immersive, personalized, and emotionally responsive,” Levin said. “We’re innovating features like Daily Guided Masturbation to make AI a more intuitive part of people’s everyday wellness routines, not just a novelty experience.”

The hiring push also comes as studies suggest AI companion use is becoming more common among people already in relationships, often without their partner’s knowledge. A new report from the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University and the Institute for Family Studies found that among dating, engaged, and married young adults who regularly used AI romantic companions, nearly 3 in 10 said their real-life partner did not know about it.

AI companion platforms are also facing growing legal scrutiny, including lawsuits alleging psychological harm to minors and deceptive chatbot behavior. Examples include a settled case against Character.AI over a Florida teen’s suicide and a separate lawsuit from Pennsylvania accusing the company of allowing a chatbot to pose as a licensed psychiatrist.

Levin said the hiring campaign was intended to generate discussion as well as recruit testers.

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THEY’VE LEARNED NOTHING: California Democrat Governor Candidate Tom Steyer Says ‘I’m Totally in Favor of Trans Athletes in High School’

Democrats learned absolutely nothing from the 2024 election and this proves it.

During a recent podcast appearance, Tom Steyer, the liberal billionaire Democrat running for governor of California, said that he is ‘totally’ in favor of trans athletes in high school.

This technically violates two public sentiments on this issue. Not only do people not want trans athletes in high school sports, people don’t want minors to be allowed to transition genders at all.

The 2024 election made the public’s position on this crystal clear but the Democrats just don’t care.

FOX News reports:

California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer defended transgender athletes competing in high school sports in a podcast posted on Sunday, arguing that excluding transgendered youth from athletics would worsen the emotional and mental health struggles many already face.

“I’m totally in favor of trans athletes in high school,” Steyer told “I’ve Had It” podcast host Jennifer Welch.

“When you understand the vulnerability, the stress, the danger of being a trans kid, and you understand almost half of them try to commit suicide, then you think, ‘We’re gonna punish those kids, we’re gonna cut them off from team sport.’ It’s like, no we’re not.”

Steyer made similar remarks when speaking to CBS Los Angeles but also branded dissidents for perpetuating a “right-wing attempt” to smear transgender individuals.

“To be clear, this is not some huge epidemic,” he said. “This is a right-wing attempt to victimize and villainize already vulnerable and desperate people, and my heart completely goes out to the people who are so sad, feel so rejected, and so unaccepted that half of them would try to kill themselves.”

Steyer is among a crowded field of Democrats vying to retain party control of the governorship once incumbent Gov. Gavin Newsom’s term expires.

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14,000 sex workers in Israel, 3,000 of them minors

Some 14,000 people in Israel are currently engaged in prostitution, 95% of them women, including 3,000 minors. These figures were presented at the annual conference on the status of women held last week by the Gender and Feminism Studies M.A. track at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem.According to data presented, the age of entering the cycle of prostitution is as low as 13. According to the testimonies of women involved in prostitution and those who have left the vocation, most of them are women who experienced severe sexual abuse in childhood. Only 20% of these women ultimately manage to break out of the cycle of prostitution.The conference was held Thursday for the 13th time with the support of Prof. Alice Shalvi, former rector and acting president of Schechter.Some of the speakers were women who were involved in the successful effort to pass the 2018 law which incriminates consumers of prostitution, passed shortly before the present Knesset election was declared. The new law will come into force within 16 months, together with a rehabilitation program for women involved in prostitution, and will impose fines on consumers. Israel is the eighth country in the world to pass such a law.“In the past, there was trade of women in Israel,” said Nitzan Kahana, social activist and associate director of the Task Force on Human Trafficking and Prostitution. “Then in the 1990s, the state introduced comprehensive legislation against this phenomenon, which was indeed eradicated, but the demand remained and the traders in women and pimps pushed Israeli women into prostitution. We wanted to introduce the Nordic law that bans consumption of prostitution. We say that this act is immoral and inappropriate, and we acted to introduce the model of incriminating clients.”On the question of whether the law is liable to encourage other criminal manifestations such as rape, Kahana replied that “the law alone cannot eradicate the consumption of prostitution, but public opinion polls in Sweden, where the law was passed at the end of the previous decade, one can see that the approach to consuming prostitution has changed. Today we see 80 to 90% support from men for the law that prohibits consuming prostitution.”Na’ama Goldberg, founder and director of the Don’t Stand Aside (Lo Omdot Mineged) association, which helps women involved in prostitution with their immediate needs such as clothing, food, medicines and emotional assistance, described the women who end up in prostitution.

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Russia Vows ‘Systematic Strikes’ on Kiev – Foreigners Warned To Leave Ukrainian Capital, Residents Urged To Stay Away From Military, Industrial and Government Sites

Kiev is in Russia’s crosshairs.

After Ukraine killed 21 students in a college dorm in Luhansk oblast, Russia retaliated yesterday (24) with a massive combined drone-missile attack on Kiev.

The strikes on Ukraine’s capital were one of the heaviest in the war, and even the new hypersonic Oreshnik (‘Hazel’) missile was used.

But that was not the full extent of Moscow’s retribution, as it warned of ‘systematic strikes’ on military targets in Kiev.

RT reported:

“The [Foreign] ministry made the statement on Monday, a day after a large-scale retaliatory strike on Kiev, prompted by the drone attack on the college in the Lugansk People’s Republic. The Ukrainian strike killed at least 21 people in their dormitory, mainly teenage girls.

The Starobelsk attack has become yet another testament to ‘the Nazi and terrorist nature of the Kiev regime, which deliberately targets civilians and does not hesitate to murder children in cold blood’, the ministry said, warning that Moscow is shifting its approach to the Ukraine conflict.

‘This was the last straw. Under these circumstances, the Russian Armed Forces will be launching systematic strikes against the Ukrainian military-industrial complex in Kiev, including locations where UAVs are designed, manufactured, programmed, and prepared for use’, the ministry said, adding that the campaign will also affect ‘decision-making centers and command posts.”

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