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.

A Teenager Didn’t Do Her Online Schoolwork. So a Judge Sent Her to Juvenile Detention.

One afternoon in mid-June, Charisse* drove up to the checkpoint at the Children’s Village juvenile detention center in suburban Detroit, desperate to be near her daughter. It had been a month since she had last seen her, when a judge found the girl had violated probation and sent her to the facility during the pandemic.

The girl, Grace, hadn’t broken the law again. The 15-year-old wasn’t in trouble for fighting with her mother or stealing, the issues that had gotten her placed on probation in the first place.

She was incarcerated in May for violating her probation by not completing her online coursework when her school in Beverly Hills switched to remote learning.

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Congress Should Let D.C. Decriminalize Psychedelics, Advocates Say

Drug policy reform advocates are asking a key congressional committee to reject a Republican lawmaker’s attempt to block Washington, D.C. from enacting an initiative to decriminalize certain psychedelics.

Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD)—who has also championed provisions preventing D.C. from implementing legal marijuana sales after local voters passed a cannabis initiative in 2014—signaled last week that he’s planning to introduce an amendment to a spending bill during a committee meeting on Wednesday that would restrict the District from allowing the psychedelics measure to be implemented even if it is approved by voters in November.

The Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) is in favor of the proposal and, on Tuesday, it sent a letter to leadership in the House Appropriations Committee asking members to oppose Harris’s amendment and any other effort to restrict the democratic process for D.C. residents.

The measure, which hasn’t formally qualified for the ballot yet but received significantly more signatures than required when activists submitted them last week, would make a wide range of entheogenic substances including psilocybin mushrooms and ayahuasca among the jurisdiction’s lowest law enforcement priorities. However, it wouldn’t technically change local statute.

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Taos County deputies set up DWI, COVID-19 checkpoints

For the second night in a row the Taos County Sheriff’s Office will set up DWI checkpoints that double as COVID-19 information spots. The checkpoints will be set up Friday night on Highway 522 and Highway 285. Deputies will pass out information on the state mandates and phone numbers for the CDC and the Department of Health. They’ll talk to people about symptoms and signs of the virus and where they can get tested.

“It’s been overwhelming support and gratitude, especially from the out of staters who are entering New Mexico – because they just don’t know… so they’re grateful that we’re handing out this information,” said Sheriff Jeffy Hogrefe. He says Thursday night deputies screened at least 500 cars at two checkpoints. Roughly half of the cars were from out of state. They did not make any DWI arrests.

Taos County deputies set up DWI, COVID-19 checkpoints

Sen. Josh Hawley Says He ‘Took on an Asian Trafficking Ring’ and ‘Freed a Dozen Women in Sex Slavery.’ That’s Not True.

When Missouri police raided several Springfield massage parlors in 2017, as Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) tells it, it was a righteous rescue mission led by a promising young attorney general who would later go on to become a rising Republican star in the U.S. Senate.

Hawley’s self-aggrandizing account goes like this: After getting wind of a potential sex trafficking ring at Asian massage parlors all around Greene County and the city of Springfield, Hawley’s office helped state and county police free “female victims” from being trapped in massage parlors and “forced into sex work,” while “the participants in the ring were charged.”

In fact, Hawley said at the time, “some evidence collected by Highway Patrol, leading up to these raids, suggested that there are potentially ties to Asian organized crime.”

While this tale nicely reinforces Hawley’s long-standing preoccupations with public morality and Chinese hegemony, the evidence doesn’t back up his version of events. The real story is one about police and prosecutor overreach at the expense of potentially vulnerable immigrants, followed by grandstanding and falsehoods from a senator intent on rewriting his own history.

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