It’s largely assumed that human trafficking is both widespread and underreported…these assumptions are unsubstantiated by research. – Georgia Bureau of Investigation
A 22-year-old former [Wisconsin]…woman previously accused of child sex-trafficking has been convicted on a lesser charge. Jalessa K. Hill…was sentenced…to 30 days in jail with work release and three years probation for soliciting prostitutes. A charge of marijuana possession was dismissed…Judge Karen Seifert also ordered Hill to not have or use alcohol, drugs or paraphernalia, to pay $518 and to [endure] any [brainwashing] deemed necessary…Hill and Lana L. Morgan, who was 17 at the time, went…to meet with a [lying pig pretending to be a client]…
The Clueless Leading the Hysterical
On [Halloween] the Bureau County, Illinois, sheriff’s office issued a press release describing “an incident following Trick or Treat” in which “parents came forward with suspicious looking candy marked as Crunch Choco Bar,” the wrapper of which “has small pictures of cannabis leaves on it.” According to Bureau County Sheriff James Reed, “the substance was field tested and was positive for containing cannabis”…the picture accompanying Reed’s press release shows Japanese candy bars sold under the brand name Iroha Kaede, which is a kind of maple tree…Those…are actually small pictures of maple leaves. If the candy bar really did come up “positive for containing cannabis” in a field test, that just shows how unreliable such tests are…
Besides the fact, obvious to anyone who’s ever seen a maple tree (or the Canadian flag), that those designs are indeed maple leaves and not cannabis leaves (which don’t look much like maple leaves except to the extremely stupid or the nearly-blind), I can assure you as a regular consumer of cannabis candy that absolutely nobody who isn’t absolutely howling mad would give it to kids; that shit is incredibly expensive, like $3.50 to $5 apiece for candies of the size these would appear to be. Another tip for those who’ve never had the legal stuff in their hands: the dosage of THC is helpfully marked right there on the package, with no “field test” necessary.
Sparsely-populated states come up with the most ludicrous concepts for supposed “gypsy whore” magnets:
One of South Dakota’s largest economic drivers also serves as one of the most vulnerable seasons for victims of sex trafficking. Hunting season…is one of two major tourist attractions in South Dakota, the other being the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, said Leasa MacFarling, a volunteer with the South Dakota West River Human Trafficking Task Force. These events also serve as attractions for traffickers…MacFarling has been traveling around Pierre distributing fliers and lip balms with the warning signs of a traffic victim and the number to the National Human Trafficking Hotline…
As idiotic as this is, it’s not a new fantasy; I first reported it from Minnesota three years ago tomorrow in “Traffic Circle“.
The End of the Beginning (#325)
Yes, these people are actually arguing for indefinite imprisonment without trial or sentence:
Growing numbers of sex offenders are still being confined in Minnesota’s controversial treatment program even after courts approved their release…Across the state, anxious communities are rushing to pass extraordinary rules aimed at banning sex offenders from moving in, with far-reaching ordinances that would effectively bar them from any residential neighborhood. More than 40 localities have adopted such bans…the city of Dayton…passed one of the most restrictive measures yet, barring offenders from living near churches, pumpkin patches and apple orchards…The backlash is confounding state officials, who are running out of places to house sex offenders even as they face mounting court pressure to release more of them…Some measures are so sweeping that the towns have become effectively off-limits to offenders…The rush to craft such ordinances intensified late last year, after U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank issued a ruling, now under appeal, that the state can no longer confine offenders indefinitely without a clear path toward release…
San Diego has become one of the most corrupt pocket police states in the US:
James Slatic, a California medical marijuana business owner, found out…one day in January…the San Diego police had frozen all of their bank accounts: $55,258 from Slatic’s personal checking and savings account; $34,175 from his wife Annette’s account; and a combined $11,260 from the savings accounts of their two teenage daughters, Penny and Lily…the San Diego District Attorney’s Office hasn’t charged them with any [crimes]…the Institute for Justice…filed a motion in California district court seeking the [money’s] return…five days before his family’s accounts were frozen…around 30 San Diego [cops] and DEA agents raided Slatic’s medical marijuana business, Med-West Distribution, and seized nearly $325,000 in cash from a safe…his 35 employees…lost their jobs and benefits without notice…there was no probable cause to raid Med-West…[but] San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis and the city have been particularly aggressive in policing medical marijuana businesses…
When a program on staunchly-prohibitionist NPR, in Georgia of all places, begins to question the “sex trafficking” narrative, it’s clear that its days are numbered:
…Georgia voters are facing a question about how to address what some believe is a serious and growing problem in the state and beyond: child sex trafficking. If approved, Georgia will establish a permanent fund…based on research and statistics…distorted by extreme emotions this issue raises for many people…An early step in the plan was to…levy a $5000 or greater…fee…on strip clubs, based on a disputed link between adult entertainment venues and trafficking crimes…The Safe Harbor Amendment, on the ballot now, will create a permanent fund from this fee…state Sen. Renee Unterman…[pretends that] the number of child exploitation investigations opened by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation last year [is]…4,000…However, the GBI [said]…those…cases aren’t all proven instances of trafficking…it found evidence of human trafficking was primarily anecdotal…Lawyers for Atlanta’s strip clubs argue they don’t contribute to the trafficking of children and shouldn’t have to pay for it…they’re waiting to see if the amendment passes before making a decision on not to sue…social scientists also argue that the real origins of this problem are social factors like poverty, difficult home lives and a lack of safe housing…the narrow focus on fighting child sex trafficking [pulls] resources from a social safety net that might otherwise protect children and families…
The extent to which every “authority” in this story repeatedly denies the agency and competence of adult women is quite extraordinary; it’s like reading something from the 17th century:
Gardai [fantasize] four young…Romanian women who were arrested in Galway over the weekend, were trafficked into Ireland by a criminal gang…The four…women, aged 21, 22, 23 and 30…[explained that] they were acting alone to raise money for their impoverished families in Romania…they accepted full responsibility for operating a brothel…Det. [Willie] Byrne…[refused to believe that women are intellectually capable of setting up an escort business themselves. He called his victims, from whom he and the other pigs stole €5,000] “little girls” and…[told the court about his masturbatory fantasy that] “they are under the control of Dublin or Belfast-based pimps…They wouldn’t have the ‘wherewithal’ to organize that themselves”…[the judge accepted this fantasy and pretended] the girls were being used by others not before the court…[yet still] convicted and fined each of them €200 [in addition to the money already stolen by the pigs, yet still pretended he wanted to]…help them…
“Youth pastors” are nearly as bad as cops:
A Minnesota pastor admitted to taking…photos of children that he then turned into sexually explicit images…William Helker…served as a youth pastor at All Saints Lutheran Church…took photos of children at his church and then edited them in Photoshop, including placing their heads into adult pornography, to create hundreds of new images…
Police are using powers of discretion in Bristol to introduce a partial decriminalisation of prostitution and curb crawling…Street sex workers and curb crawlers are being handed conditional discharges which encourage them to go on a course or seek help rather than face immediate arrest. The “tiered system” has seen arrests for curb crawling drop from 322 in 2011 to 10 in 2015, and has helped reduce the number of street sex workers to 150 – the lowest since 1995…
Meanwhile, in the real world, “john schools” have never been shown to have any effect at all, and “exit programs” are generally nothing but lists of phone numbers for social programs.
Sweden is so liberal, so pro-social, so just and kind!
Fifty-five percent of Stockholmers want to ban begging…It is a marked change since last year’s Stockholm survey…when 32 percent said they supported a begging ban…more and more calls for a ban are heard at a top-tier political level, despite the ruling Social Democrat-Green government…ruling out a general national ban…Another poll carried out nationally…in May indicated that 50 percent of [all] Swedes believe begging should be outlawed…
I’m glad to see this dangerous placebo is flopping on the market:
…the US Food and Drug Administration finally issued new guidance for companies that want to develop drugs to bolster female libidos. But the details suggest the agency has belatedly learned some hard-fought lessons following complaints that the controversial Addyi pill did not warrant approval last year. The…draft guidance…points to certain steps that Sprout Pharmaceuticals did not follow as part of its…marketing application to the FDA. The drug…was approved despite debate over its safety and effectiveness…Sprout won approval for Addyi, which has been a poor seller, after an unusual campaign that accused the FDA of bias…
Rapist cops don’t only attack women:
A…New Orleans [cop] was arrested…[on] Sept. 23…[after] he raped a teenage male relative…earlier this year…Marcellus White…[lured] the boy into his bedroom, [pushed] him onto a bed and [performed] oral sex…against the boy’s wishes…the 15-year-old boy and his mother have moved to Mississippi, unable to bear living in New Orleans in the wake of the sexual assault…in March or early April of this year when the boy was 14…police investigators obtained from the boy’s mother a June 20 email exchange with White, in which the [rapist cop] pleads for forgiveness while also asking that the mother drop her demand that White “step down from all positions” that give him access to minor children…
Moralistic control freaks clutch their pearls about something that doesn’t exist and never actually will as they envision it, because it was on a crappy sci-fi TV show:
…Westworld’s human guests aren’t obligated to uphold any sense of morality. The upsell for the park involves reversion to primal urges. In Crichton’s pessimistic view, the breakdown of normal society leads immediately to sex and violence…robots…[can be] raped…because consent, as a concept, doesn’t apply…But…research suggests that the real victims of Westworld’s barbaric sexual culture would be human…Kate Darling, Ph.D…at MIT Media Lab…says…either sex robots would continue to serve as a healthy outlet for our unhealthy urges or they would whet peoples’ appetites for unsavory sexual fare. Both options have their own troubling implications, but the latter is more immediately problematic. Patrick Lin, Ph.D…at California Polytechnic University, fears that sexbots might make us less human…A Westworld-like scenario presents a slippery slope similar to the one posed by or violent films or video games, perhaps even more troubling because sex robots are so “visceral” and “immersive” that they blur the line between virtual and physical reality…Sex robots — at least the sophisticated, highly anthropomorphic kind — haven’t been around long enough for us to tell if they’ll affect our sexual interactions with each other…
They “haven’t been around long enough”? WTF? They don’t even exist! Methinks writer Yasmin Tayag has been watching too much television if she thinks otherwise. And both of these “scientists” are nothing but puritans in disguise if they believe that sex drives are “created” by machines. This is the kind of crypto-moralism used to justify censorship and criminalize consensual behaviors of all kinds.