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Seeds of Surveillance: The Track and Trace Playbook

QR codes are usually associated with convenience. In the Seed Act 2026, they become something else entirely: extending traceability to what is grown before it enters the supply chain, changing who has control over our food.

The Seed Act 2026 is presented by the Union Government of India as a necessary modernisation measure to curb the circulation of fake or substandard seeds.

The stated aim is the rollout of a new nationwide traceability system that mandates QR codes on all seed packets, compulsory registration for all commercial seed entities and significantly heightened penalties—up to ₹30 lakh (€27,000+ euros) and three years’ imprisonment—for seed fraud.

The government has consistently maintained that the Seed Act 2026 is designed to regulate only the commercial seed trade and will not interfere with the long-standing rights of farmers to save, sow, exchange or share seeds within their communities.

Officials emphasise that these traditional, non-branded and community-based practices remain a vital part of India’s agricultural heritage and are explicitly exempt from the registration and digital traceability requirements imposed on commercial entities.

While the government maintains that the Act will rebuild farmer trust, streamline quality control and strictly protect the traditional rights of farmers to save, share and exchange seeds, critics like the Samyukt Kisan Morcha (an umbrella coalition of 400+ farmers’ unions) view these reforms as a well-worn corporate strategy of enclosure that eradicates seed and food sovereignty.

Critics argue that these government assurances are insufficient and potentially misleading. They contend that by failing to explicitly define and protect community seed systems as a distinct sector, the Act leaves them vulnerable to administrative overreach.

Farmer organisations worry that without clear, ironclad legal safeguards, the pressure to comply with registration and branding requirements—especially for small-scale seed producers who may use simple packaging—will effectively force them to adopt the same burdensome and costly standards as large corporations, gradually pushing decentralised, village-level systems towards extinction.

Even with an informal exemption, the pressure to meet the ‘certified’ market standard could make traditional seed sharing increasingly risky. Critics argue that the rigid requirements for ‘certified, stable and uniform’ seeds will effectively criminalise or marginalise indigenous, locally adapted varieties, creating a dependency loop that forces farmers to rely on high-cost, proprietary inputs from large agribusinesses.

This would, in effect, mirror the pattern of corporate capture and loss of food sovereignty observed in other countries across the world.

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Houthis Say Forces ‘Repelled’ Saudi Warplanes From Threatening Iranian Civilian Airliner

Yemen’s Houthis announced Friday that they had “repelled” an attempt by Saudi warplanes to prevent an Iranian civilian aircraft from landing at Sanaa airport.

Yemeni Armed Forces (YAF) spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Saree said that Saudi warplanes violating Yemeni airspace were targeted with several air-defense missiles, forcing them to withdraw.

Saree stressed that the Iranian civilian aircraft was carrying more than 200 Yemeni citizens who had been stranded in Iran, including many who were sick or wounded.

“We warn the criminal Saudi enemy against repeating any attempt to violate our airspace or any aggression targeting our country. Such actions will be met with a comprehensive response targeting its airports and vital interests on land and sea,” Saree said in a video statement.

The YAF spokesman further stressed that “our hand is on the trigger” to implement any directives issued by Ansarallah leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi “within the framework of breaking the Saudi-American siege on our people and expelling the occupiers.”

Saree also praised Iran’s role in “breaking the siege” on Yemen by operating flights to transport patients and stranded people and to alleviate humanitarian suffering in Yemen.

After landing in Sanaa, the Iranian plane safely returned to Tehran carrying an official delegation of the Republic of Yemen to participate in the funeral of slain Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei.

Since 2015, Saudi Arabia has imposed a blockade on Yemen’s land, sea, and air ports, severely restricting vital commercial and humanitarian imports, including fuel and food.

The blockade triggered what the UN called one of the most severe humanitarian crises globally, leading millions towards famine and drastically damaging healthcare and water systems.

The Saudi siege on Yemen was partially lifted following April 2023 negotiations with the Ansarallah resistance movement, which leads the YAF and is closely allied with Iran.

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Patriot Front Agitprop Group Tries to Ruin America 250 Celebration in Washington

You may be familiar with the agitprop group called the Patriot Front. They always showed up at convenient times when the Democrats were in power, obviously to make it look like the right is nothing but khaki-wearing white supremacists akin to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

Of course, this was before the arrival of the second Trump administration and its Department of Justice, which is presently investigating the leftist Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on allegations it was behind the funding and support of several real white supremacists and white supremacist groups, including the actual KKK.

More often than not, everyday conservatives on the X platform, along with well-known conservatives, will say the same thing about the Patriot Front. No one knows anyone involved in the group or who supports it. It’s not even clear what they’re trying to accomplish, or what they’re all about beyond a few chants designed to provide the impression this is the second coming of the KKK.

I mean no one. For this reason, the common refrain among conservatives is that this has to be a bunch of feds conducting an op that’s designed to try to smear the right.

With the Trump administration in charge of the intelligence community, specifically the FBI, people have assumed the reason we haven’t heard from the Patriot Front since Trump came back served as proof that the group consisted mostly of feds all along.

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Far Lefties Off The Rails: At Least TEN Recent Arrests / Convictions For Alleged Threats Against President Trump Across America + Canada.

The delusional “be kind” and inclusive crowd has been showing their true colors with a string of recent assassination threats against President Trump. These are just the ones we know about reported in recent news.

These threats from across America are in addition to the planned violent attack at the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event at the White House by those from CA, IL, MO, NE, OH, and WA.

There are so many that this reporting extends over three articles. By the time the planned third article is out, we may need to add a few more!

First up, Florida.

FLORIDA

In March, we reported about a Pensacola, FL man who was charged with threatening to murder President Trump, with a military background, allegedly. Also in May, we reported that a Sarasota, FL woman was sentenced to 14 months in federal prison for calling for MAGA supporters to be shot, on TikTok.

A third addition from the Sunshine State comes out of the central Florida area, east of Gainesville. First Coast News reported that a 27-year-old man was arrested last month accused of threatening to kill President Trump. If convicted, he may face 10 years in federal prison.

According to the indictment, on April 16, 2026, “Ryan Brown transmitted an online message to “whitehouse.gov,” directed to the President, in which he threatened to blow up the White House in one week’s time. Subsequently, on May 25, 2026, Brown sent another message to “whitehouse.gov” stating, in part, that he would kill the President in cold blood.”

Was Brown binge-watching MSNow while sending out these assassination threats, or overly excited reading far-left, Ivy League professors commenting on Bluesky? I suppose we’ll find out in the upcoming court case.

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Six California Cities Ranked Among Top 10 Least Educated In US

Six California cities ranked among the top 10 least educated metropolitan areas in the United States, according to a report by WalletHub published on June 29.

Looking at the 150 most populated metro areas, the city of Visalia ranked as the second least educated, while Bakersfield was fourth, and Modesto, Fresno, Stockton, and Salinas followed.

All six are in central California.

The other four metros that rounded out the top ten were all in Texas – McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Brownsville-Harlingen, Beaumont-Port Arthur, and El Paso, at first, third, ninth, and tenth least educated, respectively.

“Higher education doesn’t guarantee better financial opportunities in the future, but it certainly correlates with it,” WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo said in the report.

“The most educated cities provide good learning opportunities from childhood all the way through the graduate level.”

As Dylan Morgan reports for The Epoch Times, to determine the ranking, WalletHub equally factored in the share of adults at least 25 years old who have a high school diploma or higher, who have at least some college experience, who have a bachelor’s degree or higher, and who have a graduate or professional degree.

Visalia ranked last among the 150 metros in percent of bachelor’s degree holders and percent of graduate or professional degree holders.

It ranked 107th highest in median annual household income, and there appeared to be a general correlation between income and education rates across the nation.

However, Visalia still had a lower poverty rate than the state average—11.3 percent compared to 11.8 percent, according to U.S. Census data—and Stockton ranked as having the 31st highest median household income while Salinas ranked as 26th highest, though those two cities were near the bottom in education.

Education and income rate correlations may not reflect California’s higher cost of living and regional economic structures, such as the Central Valley’s reliance on agriculture, an industry that has not historically required higher education the same way other California hubs have, such as Silicon Valley.

The San Jose metro, home to Silicon Valley, ranked as the fourth most educated in the United States.

WalletHub said that more than 55 percent of the San Jose metro’s population over the age of 25 have at least a bachelor’s degree, while nearly 28 percent have an advanced degree. .

It also ranked third for university quality. San Jose is near Stanford University and has Santa Clara University and San Jose State University in the center of the metro.

The nearby San Francisco metro area, which is home to the University of California—Berkeley, ranked as the eighth most educated.

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Wind and Solar Finally Meet the Taxpayer’s Breaking Point

A family paying the electric bill doesn’t care how noble a subsidy sounds in Washington. They care whether the lights stay on, the furnace runs, the air conditioner works, and the bill leaves enough money for groceries.

President Donald Trump’s tax law set July 4, 2026, as the deadline ending federal tax credit subsidies for new wind and solar projects not already under construction. U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright called the deadline the end of roughly 35 years of federal support for wind and solar, and he noted that in 2025 they comprised about 3% of total U.S. primary energy consumption. From Just the News:

The Working Families Tax Cuts, a signature piece of President Trump’s tax legislation signed a year ago, set Saturday as the deadline for federal tax credit subsidies on any new solar or wind projects not currently under construction.

U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright touted the subsidy deadline and criticized solar and wind energy projects in a video posted to social media Thursday.

“The wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine,” Wright said. “They drive up the system costs and increase Americans’ electricity prices.”

From 2010 to 2023, solar and wind energy projects received more than $141 billion in government subsidies combined, according to an analysis by the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The projects received more in government subsidies than any other energy source in the United States, the group reported.

“Beyond their direct costs, subsidies are causing artificially low or negative wholesale prices, scarcity prices during periods of high demand and low wind and solar generation, inefficient use of existing assets, and increased transmission costs,” Brent Bennett, a researcher at the Texas foundation wrote.

The original argument for subsidies was patience. Give the industry help, let technology improve, then let the market decide. After decades of federal support, taxpayers were still being asked to finance energy sources that need backup, transmission buildouts, land, materials, and favorable rules to compete.

Patience became a policy shift; policy drift becomes a bill the public never really got to vote on.

The White House executive order signed July 7, 2025, said federal policy would rapidly eliminate market distortions and taxpayer costs tied to green energy subsidies. The order directed the Treasury Department to strictly enforce the termination of clean electricity production and investment tax credits under sections 45Y and 48E for wind and solar facilities. 

It also directed the Interior Department to review policies that favor wind and solar over dispatchable energy sources.

Just the News report placed the cost in plain sightWind and solar subsidies were estimated at more than $141 billion from 2010 to 2023, more than any other energy source. Before the cuts, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the two programs would increase the federal deficit by $308 billion from 2026 through 2035.

Those figures should settle the basic question. Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to bankroll electricity that still struggles when demand peaks and weather refuses to cooperate. America needs power that can run steel mills, hospitals, data centers, farms, factories, and homes without asking families to pray for sunshine or a breeze.

Wind and solar have a role where they make sense. Let them compete; let investors risk their own money; let customers decide what they want to buy.

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Joe Biden Receives Massive Blowback For Posting Anti-American Fourth of July Message on America’s 250th Celebration

Joe Biden received massive blowback for his anti-American Fourth of July message on the 250th celebration on Saturday.

In a message posted to social media, Biden (or his staffer) claimed America is just an idea.

Joe Biden also scolded Americans for not fully living up to the words in the Declaration of Independence.

Biden’s full statement:

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of Americans signed their names to a piece of parchment and made a promise no nation had ever made before: that we’re all created equal, endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We’re the only nation in history built not on ethnicity, or blood, or geography but on an idea. That’s always been what makes us exceptional. We chose that path 250 years ago but that’s where the work began, not where it ended. Every generation has had to choose it again. At Valley Forge, at Gettysburg, on the beaches of Normandy, in the streets of Selma. Americans recommitted themselves to the principles on which our nation was founded.

Now it’s our turn.

There’s nothing guaranteed about our democracy. We have to fight for it, defend it, and earn it. Over and over, year after year. That’s not a burden. That’s what it means to be an American.

250 years in, we still haven’t fully lived up to those words in the Declaration. But we’ve never walked away from them, and this July 4, I hope all of us can commit to one thing: that we never will. I don’t believe we’re as divided as we’re told we are. I’ve bet my whole life on the American people, and I’m not stopping now.

Happy 250th birthday, America. Our story isn’t finished. Let’s keep writing it together.

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Australia’s Top Censor Wants Power Over The “Ratio”

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner wants legal power to order social media companies to shield favored users from criticism and to suspend everyone piling on against them. Julie Inman Grant made the pitch on July 2, testifying to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, the government probe set up after the Bondi Beach terror attack.

She calls the tool a “notification power.” What it does is let her office tell a platform that a particular Australian account is under heavy criticism and demand that the platform punish the accounts responsible.

Her own description of the trigger runs to “insulting” and “ugly” comments stacking up beneath someone’s posts. “If there’s a pile-on, if there’s a brigade, if it’s meant to be an avalanche of online hate, we put the onus back on the platform to say, this Australian is being targeted,” she told the commission.

“We expect you to protect their account and take action against all of those people that you can see… whether it’s you just suspend them or you take them away.”

Watch the video here.

She wants the power to reach across platforms, too. The current adult cyber-abuse rules frustrate her because they force her office to “look at that specific tweet” rather than the whole swarm of replies beneath it. The fix she wants hands platforms a standing order to police disapproval on her behalf.

Grant does not think of this as censorship, of course. Asked about companies that frame their resistance as free speech, she said “it’s easy to slip a censorship label on just about anything,” and offered a softer account of her own work. “What we’re trying to do is minimize harm. Encourage as much speech as possible, but when it veers into the lane of hurting individuals, hurting communities, hurting society and undermining democracy, I think we all need to band together and take more of a stand.”

The regulator asking for authority to suspend users in bulk says her goal is more speech.

Who defines the harm that flips speech from protected to punishable? She does. Phrases like “hurting communities” and “undermining democracy” stretch far enough to cover most heated political argument, and the office reaching for them writes the definition.

Much of her testimony was a complaint that the companies keep winning. eSafety has eight cases running against X Corp, and Grant said six of them were “led by X.” She cast the legal pushback as commercial greed dressed up in principle, accusing platforms of fighting “to be able to serve, share and monetize horrific content.”

Asked whether she had actually seen platforms fight to monetize such material, she answered “I can’t imagine any other reason they would want to put it up there.”

The clearest example she offered cuts against her. After the Wakely church stabbing of Assyrian bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, eSafety sent formal removal notices to Meta and X. “Meta applied within the hour, and then of course, X Corp said, ‘We’re not taking it down, we’ll see you in court,’” Grant said.

X won the legal challenge. And the bishop whose stabbing she cited as the reason to censor went on to back Elon Musk and defend free speech from the pulpit in his first sermon after surviving the attack.

The person eSafety said it was protecting did not want her protection.

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LA City Council tried to hide details of noncitizen voting — and failed

Ten days ago, the LA City Council voted to start moving noncitizen voting toward the ballot.

This week, the council ran away from it unanimously.

What happened in between? The proposal had to be written down.

Supporters said critics were overreacting. This was just the beginning of a conversation, they argued. The details would come later.

Well, the details came later.

And the details killed it.

Last week, city staff returned with the actual language needed to move the measure forward. That is when the wheels came off the car.

On Tuesday afternoon, the City Council unanimously voted to pull the proposal from the 2026 ballot and send it back for further study.

This is how bad policy gets laundered through City Hall. Politicians vote for a vague concept wrapped in moral language. They tell voters not to worry because the details will be worked out later. Then, once the authority has been granted, the real policy is written by the same politicians and activists who avoided spelling it out before the election.

That was the plan.

It just did not survive contact with paper.

The original council vote did not create noncitizen voting in LA, and it did not put noncitizen voting itself before voters. It started a process requiring city staff to come back with ballot language and a clearer explanation of what voters would be asked to approve.

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Don’t Be Fooled By The “Democratic Socialists”, More State Bureaucracy Won’t Fix Our Problems

In mainstream political discourse a big shift is currently taking place towards the favor of “Democratic socialism” as Americans are becoming more disenfranchised with the capitalist status quo. That is, the status quo of state-capitalism, otherwise known as corporatism, wherein government intervention in the form of corporate welfare on behalf of big business stifles the market in favor of monopoly, in direct opposition to the true free market principle of voluntary enterprise, as explained by economist Murray Rothbard some decades ago.

This swing of the pendulum from one side of the statist paradigm to the other is a subject we here at The Free Thought Project have discussed for years now, and it is one that the people should not be fooled by. Yet, with the permeating influence of old guard progressives the likes of Bernie Sanders, and in more recent years rising figures like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, state-socialist sentiment has grown to influence the rise of a new wave of self identified democratic socialists, the most prominent among them being New York City’s recently elected mayor Zorhan Mamdani, along with a few other self styled democratic socialists making headway in their runs for office.

On the other side of the aisle, with midterms approaching, Republican talking heads have been ramping up their own fear mongering rhetoric akin to Cold War “Red Scare” propaganda in an attempt to drag their sullied reputation out of the mud enough to maintain some kind of political momentum. Such as with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s recent remarks deriding the Democratic Socialists of America’s platform, that unintentionally came off sounding more like an endorsement than genuine condemnation; Or President Trump doing his best Joseph Mccarthy impersonation when recently espousing that “communism is the greatest threat to our country”, despite the fact that to date there is no meaningful communist movement to be found anywhere in the United States.

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