Tag: police state

3 teens arrested for leaving scooter skid marks on painted Spokane Pride intersection

Three teenagers have been arrested after they allegedly vandalized a Pride flag-painted intersection in Spokane, Washington by leaving skid marks with the Lime scooters they were riding on.

Police received a 911 call about multiple people on scooters “causing damage to the newly painted Pride mural” on June 5 just after 9 pm, according to the Spokane Police Department.

Four suspects were reportedly seen damaging the mural, while several witnesses said that one of the subjects yelled obscenities at them before leaving the area.

Officers said the damage to the mural was “black scuff marks consistent with scooter wheels,” and that these marks were left across the mural. The mural had recently been repainted after a May 16 incident in which multiple people dumbed a liquid on the mural and set it on fire, according to KREM.

Around 30 minutes after the 911 call, officers arrested three suspects who matched witness descriptions and video surveillance.

19-year-old Ruslan V.V. Turko was charged with first-degree malicious mischief and was booked into the Spokane County Jail. Two minor suspects were issued the same charge and booked into the Spokane County Juvenile Detention Center. The charge in Washington is a class B felony.

A woman who said she witnessed the incident, Kaylee Gaines McGee, told the outlet, “we’re not gonna sit by as we watch people deliberately commit a hate crime like right in the middle of downtown.”

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Woman Faces Possible 30-Year Prison Sentence In Minnesota For Possessing Bong Water

Last year the Legislature decriminalized drug paraphernalia, even if it contains drug residue. The change represented a step back from the drug war tactics of previous decades, with an eye toward treating substance abuse as a public health problem, rather than a criminal justice concern.

But one obscure relic of the war on drug paraphernalia got overlooked, and was not included in the decriminalization bill: a provision in state law that treats bong water—the water at the bottom of a smoking device, used to cool and purify the intoxicating smoke—as a controlled substance, no different than the uncut version of whatever illicit drug the bong was used to smoke.

People don’t consume bong water, but some prosecutors still use it as evidence to charge drug defendants with more serious crimes than they otherwise would be eligible for.

Just ask Jessica Beske.

On May 8, the 43-year-old Fargo resident was pulled over for speeding on Highway 59 in Polk County, Minnesota, according to charging documents. Deputies smelled marijuana and searched the car, where they allege they found a bong, a glass jar containing a “crystal substance” and some items of paraphernalia, including pipes.

The residue on the paraphernalia tested positive for methamphetamine, as did the water in the bong and the substance in the glass jar. Deputies further reported that the bong water weighed 8 ounces and, somewhat confusingly, that the crystal substance weighed 13.2 grams “in total with the packaging.”

Beske says the “packaging” is the glass jar, and that the reason deputies included the jar in the weight is that there wasn’t a measurable quantity of substance in it. She maintains she had no drugs on her, only paraphernalia containing residue. That’s precisely the sort of offense that lawmakers decriminalized in the 2023 bill.

But the Polk County prosecutor has instead charged her with first-degree felony possession, which carries a penalty of up to 30 years in prison and a $1,000,000 fine.

It’s because of the bong water.

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US Targets Journalists Who Criticize Administration’s Foreign Policy

Scott Ritter was pulled off a NY-to-Istanbul flight yesterday by US officials and his passport confiscated in a startling new development in the government’s open drive to censor and silence critics of the Administration’s foreign policies at a time when the United States is supplying billions of dollars in arms to foment wider war in Russia, accelerate the attacks on Gazans and set the stage for war with China over Taiwan.

A Marine veteran and true American patriot, Mr. Ritter is also a noted former Chief UN weapons inspector, author and journalist.  He was enroute to Russia to attend an international conference in St. Petersburg.  

Mr. Ritter first came to my attention when he testified at a Capitol hearing I sponsored to inquire into the Bush Administration’s plans to attack Iraq. Ritter warned in August of 2002 that a case had not been made for attacking Iraq.  

Had Congress listened to Mr. Ritter, the US would have been spared the loss of thousands of our soldiers and the waste of trillions of tax dollars. Over one million Iraqis died as a result of the US attack on their country. America’s financial and moral debt will never be able to be repaid, but would not exist if we had simply looked at the evidence he presented.

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9th Circuit and COVID Jabs

A lot is going around on social media related to the 9th Circuit ruling on Health Freedom Defense Fund v. Alberto Carvalho. There is discussion online that this means mandates are done. Unfortunately – that is untrue. This very short substack is to clarify the meaning of this case.

The case is related whether the mRNA jab mandates were allowed under the law. The important point that people are discussing is the part of the case referencing Jacob v. Massachusetts – the case that is relied on to impose vaccine mandates nationally. In the current case the court essentially held that there is a plausible argument that the COVID jabs do not fall under the definition of “vaccine” as it applies in Jacobson.

In Jacobson, the court allowed a small civil penalty to be imposed if someone refused a vaccine in certain circumstances. The definition of vaccine in Jacobson recognized that to be a vaccine an intervention would necessarily prevent the spread of smallpox. In the current case the argument is that, since the COVID jabs do not prevent the transmission of COVID it is not a vaccine but rather a medical intervention. I agree with that argument but this ruling does not mean that argument was won in court.

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On the 75th Anniversary of Orwell’s ‘1984’, Five Predictions From The Book That Came True

75 years ago, George Orwell’s novel ‘1984’ was published. In the book, writing became the ultimate act of subversion and we started to see that happening in real life during the pandemic. Fortunately, enough people fought back and a few places, such as Substack, remained where we could express our opinions.

Professor Jean Seaton, Director of The Orwell Foundation, said:

“In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell posed the most terrifying of all questions: could people be brought to really believe (rather than merely pretend to believe) the lies they are told? Seventy-Five years later we are at the start of a roller-coaster experiment with our minds as we battle, rather feebly, to manage the information technologies that already do much to control us and our societies, alongside the resurgence of authoritarianism”.

The pandemic certainly showed us that people could be brought to really believe the lies that they were told.

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E.U. Censorship Laws Mostly Suppress Legal Speech

Among those who think the United States is an unseemly cesspool of unrestrained opinions voiced by those people, Europe is often touted as an alternative for speech regulation. European Union law, following in the footsteps of national legislation, imposes enforceable duties on private platforms to purge “hate speech” and “disinformation”—or else. But free speech advocates warn that these laws are clumsy and dangerous tools that threaten to muzzle expression far beyond the bounds of their nominal targets. They’re right, and they now have receipts.

In a new report, Preventing “Torrents of Hate” or Stifling Free Expression Online?, The Future of Free Speech, a think tank based at Vanderbilt University, points out that online regulation changed in 2017 with Germany’s adoption of the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), “which aimed to combat illegal online content such as defamation, incitement, and religious insults.” That law inspired lawmakers around the world, as well as similar E.U.-wide legislation in 2022 in the Digital Services Act (DSA). “The underlying assumptions surrounding the passage of the DSA included fears that the Internet and social media platforms would become overrun with hate and illegal content,” notes the report.

But “hate” and other forms of unacceptable content are often in the eyes of the beholder. And the power to punish platforms for allowing forbidden speech encourages suppressing content.

The DSA “gives way too much power to government agencies to flag and remove potentially illegal content and to uncover data about anonymous speakers,” cautioned the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2022.

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Maryland Elementary School Tries To Force Students To Say The Pledge

It’s been over 80 years since the Supreme Court ruled in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette that schoolchildren can’t be forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance. One Maryland elementary school, however, has yet to get the memo.

According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a First Amendment nonprofit, Twin Ridge Elementary School officials sent an email on April 26 informing staff that state law requires “all students and teachers are required ‘to stand and face the flag and while standing give an approved salute and recite in unison the pledge of allegiance.'” 

But the email failed to note that there is a clear exception to this requirement encoded in state law—not to mention a decades-old Supreme Court ruling. Maryland law explicitly states that “any student or teacher who wishes to be excused from the requirements” of the pledge law would be excused.

“While non-participation may upset others who believe the pledge is an important expressive act, that reaction cannot overcome the First Amendment’s protection of those who decide to abstain,” Stephanie Jablonsky, a senior program officer at FIRE, wrote in a legal letter to the school last week. “Peaceful refusal to endorse a specified viewpoint cannot be grounds for punishment. The same holds for teachers and staff.”

FIRE has called on Twin Ridge Elementary to “correct its April 26 directive and notify staff of their rights and their students’ rights” to not recite the pledge.

Unfortunately, this is far from the first time that public schools have attempted to force students and staff to say the Pledge of Allegiance in recent years.

In 2018, officials in a Texas school district settled with a student who was expelled for refusing to stand for the pledge. But before the case was over, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton publicly took the school’s side and attempted to intervene on their behalf in the federal case.

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‘The beginning of an OnlyFans video’: Jailers were watching porn and didn’t notice noose hanging in jail cell, inspection report says

Eight jailers at a beleaguered downtown Los Angeles jail were watching porn when they overlooked a noose hanging in the jail cell of a suicidal inmate, a new inspection report said.

The jailers — LA County Sheriff’s deputies — were caught during a recent inspection of “1750 Unit” at downtown’s Men’s Central Jail, which inspectors noted was extremely hot and humid with no natural light, had trash in the hallways and a whole host of other problems, according to the report by Haley Broder and Eric Miller, commissioners with the LA County Sybil Brand Commission on Institutional Inspections.

“To me, it looked like the beginning of an OnlyFans video or something,” Miller told the LA Times. “It was women in underwear, and it certainly didn’t look like they were going to put more clothes on. It looked like they were going to take them off.”

Broder told The Times the conditions in the lockup were terrible.

“There was just continuous neglect and bad conditions,” she said. “People were saying they were hungry. We saw people with giant open wounds. The trash was just everywhere — there’s so much trash. It smells. There are fires. And it seems, in general, there is just a genuine lack of interest in changing that situation.”

The porn watching came to light as commissioners conducting the inspection discovered a “self-constructed noose” hanging from the ceiling of a cell.

“Though unlikely to support the incarcerated person’s weight, the noose was obvious to anyone looking into the cell and its presence was consistent with the suicidal ideation articulated by the incarcerated person while taking his shower,” the report said.

When the commissioners reported the noose to deputies — eight of whom were sitting in an office watching a video on a large-screen TV — they said they’d check on the cell later and continued watching the video, the report said.

The commissioners left, completed their inspection of the various rows in the unit and returned to the office where the deputies remained watching a “sexually explicit video on their wide-screen television,” the report said.

It was only when a female commissioner walked in that “the deputies hurriedly removed the video from the screen.”

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Dallas Voters Could See Marijuana Decriminalization On November Ballot Under New City Council Plan

Dallas voters could decide whether to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana if City Council members approve a plan to put the measure on the November ballot, several council members said Friday.

Council member Chad West will propose the Dallas Freedom Act at a June 26 meeting, he said in a news release. A petition supporting the change garnered more than 50,000 signatures, organizers said.

“Voters in our city and across the country want to decriminalize marijuana,” West said. “Our already burdened police should focus their attention on serious crime, not arresting people with small amounts of marijuana. Bringing this to voters through a City Council-proposed Charter amendment instead of a petition will save the city time and resources.”

The proposal would direct police to stop writing tickets or making arrests for less than four ounces of marijuana. Possessing two to four ounces is a class A misdemeanor that can carry a one-year jail term and holding under two ounes is a classor B misdemeanor that can come with a 180-day sentence.

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Trump says death sentences for dealers will solve U.S. drug problem

Former President Donald Trump said soft sentences for drug dealers have helped fuel fentanyl overdose deaths in the U.S.

Trump, 77, is running against President Joe Biden in the presidential election this November.

“So many are dying where they think they’re getting something and going to have a little fun on a Friday night and all of sudden their dead,” Trump said on Fox News.

“You’ll never really solve the drug problem unless you do what other countries do – and that’s the death penalty for drug dealers,” Trump said during the interview. “A drug dealer on average will kill, during that person’s life, 500 people. Unless you have a death penalty. Right now, they don’t even get charged with anything.”

Thirty-four countries apply the death for some drug crimes, according to a 2023 report from Harm Reduction International. The report noted that Pakistan removed the death penalty as a possible punishment for certain violations of its Control of Narcotics Substances Act.

Illicit fentanyl killed nearly 38,000 Americans in the first six months of 2023, according to a 2024 DEA report. Synthetic opioids were involved in 74,225 deaths in 2022 – 68% of the total 111,036 deaths that year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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