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.

He Compared a Black Child to a Dog and Withheld Evidence in Death Row Cases. Now He’s Running for Judge.

Hugo Holland’s aggressive legal tactics made him one of Louisiana’s most renowned prosecutors and helped turn Caddo Parish, a majority Black community in the northwest corner of the state, into one of the nation’s leaders in death penalty convictions.

His nearly 40-year career, though, has been marked by controversies.

In at least two death penalty cases, Louisiana judges found that Holland withheld evidence. In a third, he secured the conviction of a Black 16-year-old, comparing the boy to a dog and telling the jury to “get rid of it”; prosecutors later admitted that Holland and his team had failed to turn over evidence.

Defense attorneys have also accused him of racism, pointing, for example, to a capital murder case several years ago in which Holland emailed one of them to say he was going to spend Veterans Day in his pickup truck looking for “a Black guy or a Mex-can.” Holland called it a joke.

Holland, 62, is now running for judge in the First Judicial District Court in Caddo Parish, and his nascent campaign appears to have substantial backing. He has raised more than $61,000 in less than two months, according to the first campaign finance report released in February — twice the amount many candidates running for the 1st Judicial Court spend in an entire campaign, said Jeffrey Sadow, an associate professor of political science at Louisiana State University in Shreveport.

Holland’s donors include an assistant district attorney with the Caddo Parish DA’s office, the district attorney of neighboring Bossier and Webster parishes, a former state judge, and members of major law firms throughout the area.

Holland’s funding haul might prove to be so daunting that it scares off potential challengers, Sadow said, though candidates have until the end of July to enter the race. “It shows he’s got an awful lot of support and that he’s considered a quality candidate,” he said.

In addition to his robust campaign fundraising, Holland has been able to bring on the head of the local Republican Party, Matthew Kay, as his campaign chair. (Kay also served as an elector for Donald Trump in 2024.)

Holland declined multiple requests for comment about his candidacy and record as a prosecutor. Neither Kay nor nine of the 10 donors Verite News and ProPublica reached out to would respond or agree to speak about their support for Holland.

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Iran’s Alleged 47-Year War on America: Debunking the 1,050 American Deaths Canard

On the eve of the horrific World Trade center attack on September 11, 2001, the mullahs and their IRGC hooligans had been in power for nearly 22 years. Yet the record for that two decade interval subsequent to the founding of the Iranian Revolution does not even remotely establish that the regime in Tehran had been wantonly prosecuting a murderous war against Americans.

Thus, from the ballyhooed list of 1,050 Americans allegedly killed by the Iranian regime during the last 47 years about 29o of these deaths had occurred before 9/11. Yet more than 90% of these unfortunate fatalities occurred in Lebanon in the midst of the war between the indigenous Shiite/Hezbollah fighters and the Israeli occupiers, including 241 deaths of US servicemen at the Marine barracks.

So let us say it again. For crying out loud, US soldiers should never, ever have been in Lebanon. Moreover, by his subsequent action which amounted to “cutting and running” under the euphemism of repositioning these forces to a far away aircraft carrier, President Reagan himself admitted his mistake.

In a word, Israel’s long running battle with the PLO and other Palestinians, which had spilled over into Lebanon’s already fraught confessional fissures in the early 1980s, had no bearing on America’s homeland security. None whatsoever. Had Washington maintained the good sense to stay out of this fight, even the car bomb incidents at the US embassy during these years would surely not have occurred, either.

Again, this period also proves the hoary myth that Iranians or their proxies killed Americans because they hated our freedoms is just damn nonsense—casuistry confected by Israeli/neocon propagandists to fuel that Big Lie that Iran has been “attacking” America for nearly five decades. To the contrary, these deaths happened because Washington was meddling where it had no business intervening at all, thereby putting American servicemen and State department employees in harms’ way for no good reason.

During this 22-year period there were also a handful of incidents where Americans were killed in Israel or Gaza by Hamas operatives. Yet no one can argue with a straight face that without what was actually Iran’s limited, episodic and secondary support for Hamas (versus the much, much larger support from Sunni Gulf states) that Israel and Hamas would have laid down together in blissful harmony.

In fact, the perpetual war between Hamas and the Israeli govenrment would have been every bit as brutal and intense, and what were 7 American deaths attributed to Hamas during the 1990s would likely have happened anyway. Surely, the Iranian regime did not provide modest aid to Hamas in order to instruct it to go out and find visiting Americans to kill.

Indeed, even the 1996 killing of 19 American servicemen at Khobar Tower in Saudi Arabia by Shiite militants actually proves a wholly different point. As it happened, the Saudi’s were supremely embarrassed by the breakdown of security with respect to the American troops still domiciled there at a time about five years after the First Gulf War ended. So in short order they rounded up six Shiite militants who they claimed had been responsible for the attack.

The interesting point, however, is that the Saudi’s refused to extradite these admitted members of Saudi based Hezbollah al-Hajaz, but instead extracted “confessions” from them with respect to their alleged Iranian-backing while in Saudi prisons. The only time America officials were ever allowed to see them or question them was on a single occasion from behind a one-way mirror in response to be pre-submitted questions. None of them ever faced US officials, prosecutors or courts without Saudi chaperones.

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‘Refuses to enforce its own precedents’: Sotomayor torches SCOTUS for inaction on ‘significant’ buried evidence in slaying of teen pizza delivery driver

Justice Sonia Sotomayor registered a sharp dissent Monday as the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up the case of a man sentenced to life in the 1998 slaying of a teenage pizza delivery driver in Louisiana, accusing her colleagues of refusing to “enforce its own precedents.”

Joined only by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sotomayor argued that it made little sense for the Supreme Court to effectively free James Skinner’s co-defendant from death row with a decision a decade earlier but to leave Skinner in prison for the rest of his days without parole, when both men were incarcerated for the murder of 16-year-old Eric Walber based on “similar sets of evidence, which centered on the same two eyewitness accounts.”

“Equal justice under law, the phrase engraved on the front of this Court’s building, requires that two codefendants, convicted of the same crime, who raised essentially the same constitutional claims, receive the same answer from the courts,” Sotomayor said. “Here, because the Louisiana courts refused to apply this Court’s Brady precedents, including a decision by this Court involving the very same evidence, Skinner risks spending the rest of his life in prison while [Michael] Wearry walks free,” Sotomayor said. “Because the Court refuses to enforce its own precedents, I respectfully dissent from the denial of certiorari.”

Under Brady v. Maryland, prosecutors must hand over “Brady material,” evidence that is exculpatory or tends to be favorable to the defense. The “withholding of evidence that is material to the determination of either guilt or punishment of a criminal defendant violates the defendant’s constitutional right to due process,” the Supreme Court held in 1963.

The evidence of Brady violations in the case of Michael Wearry was egregious to the point that the Supreme Court ruled his conviction and death sentence had to be set aside in 2016, and a new trial was “required.” Of particular concern was what the state hid from the defense about its star witness, a “jailhouse snitch” named Sam Scott who two years after the slaying claimed a lesser level of responsibility in Walber’s death while pointing to Wearry, Skinner, and three others.

That story not only changed, but was also wrong about basic facts. For instance, the witness claimed Walber was shot to death — but the evidence showed that on that April 1998 day, the Albany High School football player was filling in for someone who didn’t show up for work at Pizza Express and was beaten and run over by his own car, local CBS affiliate WAFB reported. Skinner was allegedly behind the wheel.

Further explaining why the Supreme Court found Scott’s account “dubious,” one of his versions of the crime said Randy Hutchinson — who had “undergone knee surgery to repair a ruptured patellar tendon” nine days earlier — ran after the pizza delivery driver.

Worse yet, Scott had made statements behind bars that he wanted to “‘make sure [Wearry] gets the needle cause he jacked over me,'” an inmate reported. Neither the defense nor the jury were aware of this evidence.

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OneTaste Founder Nicole Daedone Gets 9-Year Prison Sentence

Nine years in prison for preaching unpopular ideas about sexuality? That’s the sentence that a judge imposed today on Nicole Daedone of OneTaste, a company built on orgasmic meditation (OM) and other unconventional wellness practices. Daedone has also been ordered to forfeit $12 million—which is how much she got for selling the company in 2017—and to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in restitution.

The government will say that this is about human trafficking. But that’s just a sign of how “human trafficking” has become a catchall term for sex-tinged antics that prosecutors want to punish.

In this case, no one has accused Daedone and her colleague/co-defendant Rachel Cherwitz of violence. No one has accused them of confining victims, or of withholding identity documents or other items that employees might have needed to get away.

The alleged victims in this case could come and go as they pleased. They were adult women. They had college degrees, outside professional opportunities, and sometimes even independent wealth. They testified in court that they remained affiliated with OneTaste—some as employees, some as volunteers, some simply as people who took classes from the company or lived in group houses that it maintained—because they believed in its mission, believed in Daedone and Cherwitz, or wanted to maintain social status within the OneTaste community.

The government’s assertions about how Daedone and Cherwitz employed “coercion” in this case are a huge affront to freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. Prosecutors suggested that the ideas Daedone and Cherwitz spread served as a form of brainwashing. These supposedly dangerous ideas include such things as being open to new sexual experiences and the notion that engaging in daily OM—a 15-minute, partnered, clitoral stroking session—could focus the mind and help empower practitioners, especially women. Daedone and Cherwitz appear to sincerely believe these ideas, which they saw as rooted in both Buddhism and feminism.

The government’s case was also a huge affront to the idea that women are fully agentic people capable of consent, sexual and otherwise. Prosecutors suggested that anxiety about being shunned by the OneTaste community was a harm so powerful that grown women were effectively “trafficked” by it. They argued that these women’s consent—to OM, to participate in sexual fantasy scenes, to enter into and out of relationships, to engage in sex acts with OneTaste members or donors, or to pay for OneTaste classes—was rendered null by the force of fear of social exclusion and/or fear that stopping OM and other OneTaste practices would have a negative impact on their lives.

Ultimately, the case portends a dangerous new standard for what counts as forced labor and what counts as harm under federal trafficking statutes.

Sentencing for Daedone started this morning, following a June 2025 conviction on one count of conspiracy to commit human trafficking. Cherwitz, convicted of the same, is scheduled to be sentenced this afternoon.

The government sought 20 years in prison for Daedone and more than 15 for Cherwitz—basing calculations in part on alleged conduct for which they were not even charged, let alone convicted. Judge Diane Gujarati denied the government’s request for a sexual abuse enhancement based on untried conduct.

The government’s star witness was to be a woman named Ayries Blanck, whose journals were a big part of the prosecutors’ case (and, also, of a Netflix documentary). Prosecutors would eventually disclose that Blanck had fabricated evidence, producing journals she said she had handwritten in 2015 but had actually composed much later. After heavily featuring Blanck and her journals in their arguments leading up to the trial, prosecutors declined to call Blanck as a trial witness and said they no longer believed in the authenticity of portions of her journals. The case nevertheless proceeded, and now a woman is heading to prison for nearly a decade.

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SNP slammed for bid to suppress sex predator scandal

Leaked recordings of SNP politicians trying to shut down the Jordan Linden sex scandal have been branded ‘disgraceful’.

Scottish Labour said it showed the true nature of the ‘Scottish Nasty Party’.

A North Lanarkshire councillor posted the recordings to show how Linden’s colleagues tried to protect him days after he quit as council leader in 2022 over misconduct claims.

Councillors can be heard backing Linden, 30, who is said to have ‘support from the party’. They also warn against leaks to the press which could add to the crisis.

The Scottish Tories called it ‘manipulation and cover-up’.

Linden was put on the sex offenders register last week after being found guilty of ten offences against young men, including five sexual assaults, between 2011 and 2021.

His trial heard victims warned the SNP about him, but complaints were ignored and whistleblowers treated like liars.

John Swinney ordered a review of the SNP’s complaints process, but it then emerged he ignored a plea for better safeguarding from Linden’s former colleagues six months ago.

Meghan Gallagher, Scottish Tory candidate for Linden’s hometown of Bellshill, said: ‘These recordings highlight the scale of manipulation and cover-up the SNP were engaged in.

‘Swinney’s independent review into the SNP’s complaints procedure is a cynical PR exercise.

‘His party will always put their interests before doing the right thing.’

One of Linden’s key allies during his offending was Tracy Carragher, now leader of the SNP opposition on the council and a Holyrood list candidate for Central Scotland.

She and fellow SNP councillor Fiona Fotheringham were defence witnesses in the trial.

On the leaked recordings, Cllr Carragher is heard saying: ‘Jordan’s got a lot of support. He’s got support from the party, from his family and from his partner. The party told him not to comment.

Cllr Fotheringham cited the backlash to then SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford for urging colleagues to ‘give as much support as possible’ to sex pest MP Patrick Grady,

She said: ‘We are supportive of Jordan. We send our love. We’ve sent our support.’

She then added: ‘I would not expect to read anything like that in the papers.’

Cllr Claire Barclay said she was ‘disgusted’ at leaks, claiming whoever leaked one particular email had ‘put the party at risk and independence at risk’, adding: ‘It’s evil, absolute evil.’

She said: ‘If it doesn’t stop, we’ll find out who that person is and the full force of disciplinary [action] will go against them. That is a final warning. The cameras are on us.’

Cllr Kirsten Larson said: ‘Based on the information I have, the only thing Jordan Linden is guilty of is being a young person.’

Scottish Labour deputy leader Dame Jackie Baillie said: ‘These recordings prove that the Scottish Nasty Party are determined to bully and gaslight victims of sexual abuse to try and desperately preserve their reputation.

‘Disgraceful remarks can be heard from several SNP councillors in these recordings.

‘Despite the SNP attempting to deny knowing about Linden’s despicable behaviour, they were told explicitly about him in emails sent in 2017 and 2022.

‘The SNP and Swinney are not fit for office. They are a party that is addicted to cover-up and secrecy.’

The four councillors who were taped were approached for comment.

The SNP said it ‘welcomes the verdict against Mr Linden and commends the bravery of the individuals who came forward and shared their experiences with the police’.

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Beloved highschooler Lily Bova gunned down outside Chicago — and cops won’t say who did it

A 16-year-old girl was gunned down in a quiet Chicago suburb Saturday morning — and authorities have neither caught nor identified her suspected killer.

The victim, identified as high school sophomore Lilly Bova, was killed in the Cook County neighborhood of Glenview around 11 a.m., authorities said.

Sheriff’s deputies are searching for a person of interest but have revealed few details about who may have killed the well-liked teen.

“While we cannot share further details at this time, this was an isolated incident and does not appear to pose a risk to the general public,” the Cook County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement — without revealing further details about the murder that has shocked her loved ones in the peaceful, affluent village.

Bova was “bright, positive and mature beyond her years,” her school principal said in a message to students and parents viewed by Fox 32.

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Iran puts US students in crosshairs with campus threat as new US missile strike on school sparks fury

Iran has threatened to target American campuses in the Middle East in retaliation for US-Israeli strikes on its schools. 

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard set a deadline for noon on Monday for the Trump administration to ‘condemn the bombing of the universities’ or else it would retaliate against US students studying abroad in the Middle East.  

Regime officials warned that employees, professors, and students affiliated with US schools in the region should stay at least one kilometer from their campuses.

Iran claims strikes hit the Tehran University of Science and Technology over the weekend, damaging nearby buildings but not resulting in any casualties.

‘If the US government wants its universities in the region to be free from retaliation… it must condemn the bombing of the universities in an official statement by 12 noon on Monday, March 30, Tehran time,’ the regime told Iranian media. 

Multiple American universities operate campuses abroad, where thousands of students often study with financial support from host governments.

New York University has a campus in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, while Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern and Texas A&M each have satellite campuses in Qatar’s Education City, a research hub based in Doha.

Texas A&M said it closed its Qatar campus, moving to remote learning and with most international staff returning home amid the war.

Around 5,000 Americans studied in the Middle East and North Africa in the last academic year, with around half in Israel and roughly 1,000 in the UAE, according to the State Department.

Since the start of the war, deadly missile strikes have hit Iranian education facilities, including an elementary school attack on February 28 in the city of Minab that killed 175 people, most of them children.

The attack sparked a US military investigation whose preliminary findings concluded that American forces were likely responsible due to outdated intelligence. The building was once part of a regime naval base.

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Denver Imposes Water Restrictions, Orders Restaurants To Serve Only On Request

Restaurants in Colorado’s capital are only allowed to serve water to guests if they ask, according to new restrictions by the Denver Board of Water Commissioners.

“Restaurants and catering businesses shall serve water only upon request,” the mandatory irrigation restrictions read.

The rules were issued in the Mile High City after the commissioners declared a Stage 1 Drought and made plans to seek a 20 percent reduction in water use. City officials expect drought conditions to last until April 30, 2027.

The update will affect many businesses, including the hospitality industry.

“Lodging establishments shall not change sheets more often than every four days for guests staying more than one night, except for health or safety reasons or upon express request of guests,” the Denver Board of Water Commissioners stated.

Drivers who attempt to wash their car are told to use a bucket or a hand-held hose equipped with an automatic shut-off nozzle if they don’t use a commercial car wash.

Residents can water their grass only two days per week, according to the schedule provided by city officials, but it is prohibited between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., when the sun is up.

“Current conditions indicate that this is going to be an exceptionally challenging year for our water supply,” Nathan Elder, manager of water supply for Denver, said at a Denver Board of Water Commissioners meeting.

“Snow pack levels are at historic lows and are melting earlier and more rapidly than normal.”

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NASA Partially Lifts Redactions in James Webb Briefing Records Following Appeal

A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case involving congressional briefings on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has yielded additional records following a successful appeal, but the newly released material continues to be heavily redacted, leaving key portions of the briefing content concealed.

The case, labeled as 25-00860-F-HQ, stems from a September 22, 2024, FOIA request seeking “all briefings about the James Webb telescope and program, made for Congress,” including both classified and unclassified material related to discoveries made by the observatory. The request was originally denied with a “no records” determination, a conclusion later overturned on appeal.

As previously reported, NASA ultimately acknowledged that responsive records did exist and released a set of briefing slides in August 2025. However, those materials were almost entirely redacted under FOIA Exemption (b)(5), which protects pre-decisional and deliberative communications within government agencies.

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Treasury Dept to reward fraud whistleblowers with up to 30% of fines

The Treasury Department launched a new program Monday to reward fraud whistleblowers with up to 30% of fines that are imposed on criminals.

“As promised, Treasury will reward whistleblowers who provide timely, actionable information on fraud, sanctions violations, and other significant illicit finance activity,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.

“President Trump has been clear that Americans have a right to know that their tax dollars are not being diverted to fund acts of global terror or to fund luxury cars for fraudsters. At Treasury, we follow the money, and we strongly encourage individuals to come forward with credible tips to help safeguard our financial system.”

The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network submitted a proposed rule to the Federal Register on Monday for the whistleblower payment program.

The program includes tipsters of Medicaid and Medicare fraud, according to The New York Post.

The launch comes after Bessent visited Minnesota in January, which is where Somali immigrants allegedly defrauded government welfare programs of at least $9 billion since 2018.

The reward payments will be directly from the fines, meaning that no taxpayer money will be used, according to confidential Treasury documents that the Post obtained.

“Individuals located in the United States or abroad who provide information may be eligible for awards if the information they provide leads to a successful enforcement action that results in monetary penalties exceeding $1,000,000,” one of the documents reads.

The Internal Revenue Service runs a similar program.

The program comes after Vice President JD Vance on Friday held the first meeting of a new anti-fraud task force that he is leading.

FinCEN also issued an advisory on Monday, warning financial institutions about fraud schemes targeting government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

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