Blog

Virginia Governor Wants Amendments To Marijuana Sales Legalization Bill, Including Delayed Market Launch

Virginia’s governor is requesting that legislators make amendments to a bill to legalize recreational marijuana sales that they sent to her desk last month.

On Monday, Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) returned the measure with suggested changes—including pushing back the launch date for sales to begin by six months, from January 1, 2027 to July 1, 2027.

The move will “allow for additional time to implement a legal market safely and curb the illicit market,” a press release from the governor’s office says.

“Five years ago, the Commonwealth took the first steps to legalize marijuana—and for five years, the work sat unfinished,” Spanberger said. “We are working to set up a marketplace that is controlled, regulated, and responsible—because legal markets only succeed when there are clear guardrails and enforcement to back it up.”

“To keep our next generation safe, we must also ensure real consequences for vape shops that have spent years targeting Virginia’s kids,” she said. “We need to rein in these shady businesses and make sure a legal marijuana market does not make the problem worse.”

Under current law, adults over 21 can legally possess up to 1 ounce of cannabis. The bill as approved by lawmakers would have increased that to 2.5 ounces, but Spanberger wants lawmakers to change that to 2 ounces.

The governor’s proposal will also “strengthen the enforcement provisions” in concert with a related bill lawmakers sent her on the issue “to put a greater focus on consumer and product safety,” her office’s press release said.

Spanberger is additionally proposing that the cannabis excise tax in the bill increase from 6 percent to 8 percent after July 1, 2029, and that regulators be allowed to license only up to 200 retail marijuana dispensaries prior to 2029 instead of the 350 included in the initial wave in the bill as passed by lawmakers.

The legislature is set to reconvene to address the governor’s proposal on April 22.

Meanwhile, Spanberger signed several other cannabis bills on Monday—including measures to protect the parental rights of consumers and allow patients to access medical marijuana in hospitals. She also proposed amendments to legislation to provide resentencing relief for people with past convictions and to change rules for marijuana delivery services.

Personal marijuana possession and home cultivation of marijuana has been legal in Virginia since 2021, but former Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) twice vetoed bills to provide consumers with a way to legally purchase regulated adult-use cannabis.

The marijuana sales bills that Spanberger wants amendments to are SB 542 from Sen. Lashrecse Aird (D) and HB 642 from Del. Paul Krizek (D).

Keep reading

Rep. Lauren Boebert Demands Answers for ‘Deeply Troubling Abuse of Power’ by NSA Analysts

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) on Monday wrote to National Security Agency (NSA) Director Joshua Rudd about multiple instances of “deeply troubling abuses of power” by NSA analysts who have misused Section 702 of FISA to search private communications, including a person met through a dating service and a potential tenant.

“I write to demand answers about a deeply troubling abuse of power by a National Security Agency analyst who exploited one of our nation’s most sensitive surveillance authorities to spy on Americans met through an online dating service,” Boebert wrote to the NSA.

She recounted an incident that was disclosed by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight (PCOAB)’s September 2023 report that “represents exactly the kind of government overreach that erodes the trust of the American people in their intelligence community.”

“As a Member of Congress who takes both national security and the constitutional rights of every American seriously, I find it unacceptable that nearly three years after this abuse was disclosed, the public has received no accounting of what consequences, if any, were imposed on the individuals responsible,” she added.

Keep reading

As US Initiates Blockade Of Hormuz, Trump Warns Any Iranian Ships Coming Near Will Be ‘Eliminated’

Mediators Still Press For Iran Deal After US Demanded 20-Year Halt To Nuclear Program

On Monday a US official has been cited in Axios as saying Iran must halt its nuclear enrichment program for 20 years to end the war, scaling back from an earlier White House demand for a permanent end to enrichment. And that’s when sources say the Iranians countered with a shorter “single digit” period, or less than ten years.

Multiple Middle Eastern countries are still working to mediate a resolution, as both Washington and Tehran moved away from maximalist positions on enrichment. Before the talks, Trump demanded a permanent halt, while Iran pushed for a deal allowing a civilian nuclear program without additional restrictions. Axios has further said the “door is not closed” on a deal, but certainly the two sides’ are still far apart, with Tehran accusing Washington of inexplicably reverting to intolerable “maximalist demands.”

At Least 15 US Navy Ships Enforce Blockade

The Wall Street Journal has newly detailed that more 15 American warships are now in place to support the operation, in the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. The report further specified that “An advisory to mariners from U.K. Maritime Trade Operations, which is affiliated with Britain’s Royal Navy, said maritime-access restrictions were being enforced for Iranian ports and coastal areas along the Persian Gulf, Gulf of Oman and parts of the Arabian Sea.

“Any vessel entering or departing the blockaded area without authorization is subject to interception, ​diversion, and capture,” a notification from US Central Command (CENTCOM) has said. And UKMTO has warned maritime traffic, “These access restrictions apply without distinction to vessels of any flag engaging with Iranian ports, oil terminals, or coastal facilities.”.

Keep reading

The Public Safety Machine: How Miami-Dade Built A Six-Figure Pipeline That Keeps Recycling The Same Names

If you want to understand how power actually moves inside Miami-Dade government, stop focusing on titles.

Watch the pattern. Watch the nonprofit galas, the communication’s glitz. Then you’ll know who’s being promoted by miami Dade tax payers dollars.

Because the pattern doesn’t change. The names don’t change. Only the positions do.

Mayor Daniella Levine Cava didn’t just inherit a public safety structure. She built the modern version of it in 2022, creating the role of Chief Public Safety Officer and appointing J.D. Patterson to lead it.

Patterson wasn’t just another administrator. He came out of a network of nonprofits and community organizations deeply embedded in the same civic ecosystem that overlaps with the administration’s leadership base.

That’s the model: government leadership, nonprofit ecosystem, and internal alignment.

From there, the system didn’t stabilize. It started rotating.

First J.D. Patterson. Then James Reyes, elevated into a sweeping public safety role overseeing multiple departments. Then Arnold Palmer, now heading the Office of Public Safety. And now, quietly positioned inside that same structure, Stephanie V. Daniels, Director of Security and Compliance within the Office of the Chief of Public Safety. A position created for her to come back from “retirement” so as to make the public safety appointment an internal hire.

Same structure. Same network. Same pipeline.

Keep reading

The Strait Of Hormuz Crisis Exposes A Fatal Flaw In Economic Thinking

A priest, an engineer, and an economist are stranded on a desert island. The first order of business is to get some food. The priest suggests that they all pray. The practical-minded engineer suggests that the three men make a net to catch some fish. But where will they find the necessary materials? The priest and the engineer turn to the economist and ask him if he has any ideas. The economist replies, “Assume a fish.”

This well-worn economist joke summarizes one of the chief flaws in contemporary economic theory.

That theory almost completely ignores the role of physical resources, assuming they will always be available in the quantities we need at prices we can afford at the time we need them. When those resources aren’t available, that theory begrudgingly accepts that there will be some damage to economic activity, but tends to greatly underestimate the impact.

This conceptual flaw explains why economists in most financial institutions and governments, and thus investors, are not especially alarmed at the loss of energy resources, as stock market indices remain not too far from their recent highs.

For a good summary of how contemporary economic theory goes off the rails, Australian economist Steve Keen offers a mercifully brief and comprehensible explanation. Here I will relate one critical part of that explanation. About 5.7 percent of U.S. GDP is devoted to procuring and distributing energy. Most economists will tell you that a 10 percent decline in energy availability would have a small effect on the U.S. economy. They would take the percentage of the economy devoted to energy, in this case 5.7 percent, and multiply it by 10 percent to arrive at a 0.57 percent reduction in economic activity.

This conclusion is utter nonsense and not even close to what the effects would be.

The reason is that energy is the master resource. It cannot be treated like other resources. Energy is the resource that makes all other resources available. Nothing gets done without energy. The correlation between economic activity and energy use is 0.9 (where 1.0 represents a perfect correlation). This should come as no surprise. When the economy is growing, energy use grows with it as energy fuels the economic activity that pushes growth.

What this implies is that a 10 percent reduction in energy availability is much more likely to result in a decline in economic activity closer to 10 percent than to one-half percent.  For comparison, the real GDP of the United States fell 4.3 percent during the Great Recession, which lasted from December 2007 through June 2009.

So, how much energy is currently being denied to the global economy by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz? No one knows for certain. We do know that liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports from Qatar were previously transiting through the strait. And, close to 20 percent of the world’s oil supply was also passing through the strait on a daily basis.

Keep reading

Nicaragua Bans Several Christian Groups As Persecution Worsens

The government of Nicaragua banned at least 18 Christian groups from operating within the country as persecution from the Latin American nation’s regime worsens.

Christian Solidarity Worldwide said in a report published last month that they were able to identify 15 Protestant groups and 3 Roman Catholic groups stripped of legal status in 2025.

“Affected institutions were schools, religious radio and television outlets, and faith-based charities, including Lutheran World Relief and Food for the Hungry,” the group said.

The Independent Fundamentalist Baptists were also stripped of their legal status.

After revoking legal status, the government has in some cases taken their property.

One religiously affiliated school was allowed to operate for nine months after having its status revoked, with leadership told it would eventually be turned into a state school.

But the premises were instead used as a police station.

Keep reading

Navy’s Green Laundry Initiative Weakened A $15 Billion Carrier

The $15 billion USS Ford was forced to cut short its deployment due to a 30-hour laundry fire that did millions of dollars in damage. And it has been revealed that even while it remained on station in the Gulf, Ford could not generate combat sorties for two days due to the raging 30-hour laundry fire that drove some 600 sailors out of their sleeping quarters. Thirty hours to get a laundry fire under control raises a couple of questions. Why would a laundry catch on fire, and why did it take the firefighters and damage-control personnel of the USS Ford so long to put out the laundry fire? Sadly, the answers can be found in some wrongheaded decisions the Navy made in its effort to be viewed as being “green.”

Design for the Ford-class carrier began in March 1996, and finally, more than $15 billion later, the USS Ford was fully certified for combat in April 2023. Due to a misguided green initiative, instead of installing inherently super energy-efficient steam-based laundries, the Ford-class carriers have standardized on more expensive, more complex, inherently fire-prone, ozone-based systems.

The green reason for these systems is that they supposedly save energy and water by being able to operate with cold water only, while also needing 30 percent less water than the steam-based systems the U.S. Navy has historically relied on. A Jan. 12, 2012, Navy memo made this revealing statement:

“Ozone technology is increasing the earth-friendly aspect of shipboard laundering and moving navy laundries towards a ‘greener’ process. Good for the sailor… good for the ship… good for the earth!”

This sure sounds wonderful, but just a bit of analysis shows that the ozone-based laundries, like so many of the U.S. military’s so-called green initiatives, actually weaken our military while costing more than the mechanically robust, battle-tested systems they replace.

First, it must be pointed out that when you look at the energy budget of a typical warship, including propulsion, less than 1 percent of the warship’s total energy budget is expended on freshwater production and laundry services, with the vast majority of energy being used for the ship’s propulsion and the rest of the systems described by the Expanded Ship Work Breakdown Structure for Navy ships.

What’s more, the annual cost for producing fresh water on our entire fleet of Navy ships is just $22 million, and the water for the laundry is a fraction of this. Further, every Navy ship can produce far more fresh water than it needs for its average daily use. For example, both Ford- and Nimitz-class carriers can produce double the average amount of water needed daily. Getting more specific, installing an ozone-based laundry on an Arleigh Burke destroyer, which uses gas turbines instead of steam turbines, does result in a 30 percent reduction in energy used by its laundry system, including the energy savings from reduced freshwater desalination. But with laundries consuming less than 1 percent of ships’ overall energy consumption (including propulsion), this would result in less than 0.3 percent energy savings. All other things equal, that might make sense, especially if the systems were built into the ship from the outset. But the ozone-based systems cost more, require more ongoing maintenance, are more dependent on expensive shore-based vendor support to keep them operational, and are built around a potent oxidizer—ozone.

Finally, the ozone-related laundries end up creating a much drier environment than the moist atmosphere created by steam-reliant systems. It was the drier environment that helped create the extremely dry lint that caused the Ford laundry room fire. And these high-tech laundries require very expensive, corrosion-resistant piping, fittings, and seals, along with 24/7 monitoring to ensure the highly corrosive, lung-irritating, fire-accelerating ozone does not find its way past the specialized, very expensive seals. So, even for ships that rely on gas turbines or marine diesels, such as our Navy’s destroyers and some of our larger warships, the case for ozone-based systems is highly debatable, to say the least.

Keep reading

OpenAI Supports Illinois Bill to Limit AI Companies’ Liability for Mass Casualty Incidents, Financial Disasters

OpenAI is backing an Illinois state bill that would protect AI companies from legal responsibility when their technology contributes to severe societal harms, including mass deaths or catastrophic financial losses.

Wired reports that the ChatGPT maker has testified in favor of Illinois Senate Bill 3444, legislation that would shield frontier AI developers from liability for critical harms caused by their models under certain conditions. The bill represents what several AI policy experts describe as a notable evolution in OpenAI’s legislative approach, which until now had focused primarily on opposing measures that would increase liability for AI companies.

SB 3444 would define critical harms as incidents causing death or serious injury to 100 or more people, or at least $1 billion in property damage. Under the proposed law, AI labs would be protected from liability as long as they did not intentionally or recklessly cause such an incident and had published safety, security, and transparency reports on their websites. The bill defines frontier models as those trained using more than $100 million in computational costs, a threshold that would likely apply to major American AI company including OpenAI, Google, xAI, Anthropic, and Meta.

The legislation specifically identifies several scenarios of concern to the AI industry, including the use of AI by malicious actors to develop chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons. It also covers situations where an AI model independently engages in conduct that would constitute a criminal offense if committed by a human, provided such actions lead to the extreme outcomes defined in the bill.

Jamie Radice, an OpenAI spokesperson, said in an emailed statement: “We support approaches like this because they focus on what matters most: Reducing the risk of serious harm from the most advanced AI systems while still allowing this technology to get into the hands of the people and businesses—small and big—of Illinois. They also help avoid a patchwork of state-by-state rules and move toward clearer, more consistent national standards.”

Caitlin Niedermeyer, a member of OpenAI’s Global Affairs team, delivered testimony supporting the bill and echoed the call for federal AI regulation. Her arguments aligned with the Trump administration’s opposition to inconsistent state-level AI safety laws. Niedermeyer emphasized the importance of avoiding what she called “a patchwork of inconsistent state requirements that could create friction without meaningfully improving safety.” She also suggested that state laws can be valuable when they “reinforce a path toward harmonization with federal systems.”

Keep reading

Widespread Rationing And Global Energy Shortages Are Baked In No Matter When The War Ends Now

It is difficult to believe the pace at which global events are now moving. Apocalyptic threats are being thrown around recklessly and severe damage is being done to the global economic system every single day. A lot of people still seem to think that economic conditions will snap back to normal once the war ends, and that is because they don’t understand the level of destruction that has already taken place. Even if the war ends tomorrow and commercial traffic starts flowing freely through the Strait of Hormuz once again, the world won’t be getting nearly as much energy from the Middle East because dozens of oil and natural gas facilities have either been damaged or destroyed. That means that widespread rationing and global energy shortages are baked in no matter what happens next.

According to the executive director of the IEA, 75 energy sites in the Persian Gulf region have been attacked, and approximately a third of those sites have experienced severe damage…

It is going to take years to rebuild the damage that has already been done by this war.

So what will things look like if this war stretches on for many more months?

Tankers that traveled through the Strait of Hormuz before the war began have still been arriving at their destinations.

But this month that is going to stop happening, and Birol is warning that we are entering a “black April”…

Keep reading

Rep. Burchett Reveals Gov’t Giving $40 Million per Week to the Taliban and Dems Oppose Ending It

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) did not mince words when he pulled back the curtain on where some American tax dollars are going this past week.

In an interview with radio host Jesse Kelly, the Tennessee Republican described a system that sounds less like foreign aid and more like a revolving door of wasted cash and fraud.

Burchett said billions are flowing through so-called non-government organizations and international bodies with little to no transparency.

He pointed directly to the United Nations and a sprawling network of NGOs as conduits for that money.

According to Burchett, the total is staggering and still growing, and the spending has the total support of Democrats in the Senate.

He cited a State Department memo estimating that more than $5 billion has been sent out.

Burchett’s most striking claim should evoke concern if not anger.

He said roughly $40 million per week is effectively making its way into Taliban-controlled territory.

That is American money, collected from working taxpayers, ending up in the hands of people who openly despise them and want them dead.

The congressman tied this issue to his own bill, the No Tax Dollars For Terrorists Act, which has been sitting dormant in the Senate for about a year.

Keep reading