Tag: emergency powers

Florida Invokes Emergency Powers to Build ‘Alligator Alcatraz’

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis invoked emergency powers on June 24 to clear the way for Alligator Alcatraz, a new illegal immigration detention center deep in the Everglades.

The plans for another complex to hold illegal immigrants apprehended by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—and awaiting processing and deportation—were drafted and submitted by the Florida Division of Emergency Management (FDEM) to the Department of Homeland Security and received Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s approval on June 23.

“Under President [Donald] Trump’s leadership, we are working at turbo speed to deliver cost-effective and innovative ways to deliver on the American people’s mandate for mass deportations of criminal illegal aliens,” Noem said on X.

“We will expand facilities and bed space in just days, thanks to our partnership with Florida.”

She said the facilities would be largely funded by FEMA’s Shelter and Services program, which she noted was used by former President Joe Biden’s administration to house illegal immigrants.

The site chosen was the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport.

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Missouri governor activates National Guard, declares state of emergency

Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe (R) on Thursday declared a state of emergency and activated the state’s National Guard in anticipation of protests across the state — and in response to “civil unrest” across the country.

Missouri Executive Order 25-25 declares a State of Emergency and allows the Adjutant General to order service members to aid state officials.

The order comes after the Missouri State Highway Patrol, Missouri National Guard and Missouri Department of Public Safety established a Unified Command to monitor situations across the state and prepare local law enforcement.

Additionally, the order also declares that the Adjutant General may employ necessary equipment to support authorities and provide assistance.

While nationwide protests continue to flare up in response to the Trump administration’s immigration policies, Kehoe said his order is purely precautionary.

“We respect, and will defend, the right to peacefully protest, but we will not tolerate violence or lawlessness in our state,” the governor said.

“While other states may wait for chaos to ensue, the State of Missouri is taking a proactive approach in the event that assistance is needed to support local law enforcement in protecting our citizens and communities,” he added.

To read Kehoe’s full order, click here.

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The False Claims of WHO’s Pandemic Agreement

One way to determine whether a suggestion is worth following is to look at the evidence presented to support it. If the evidence makes sense and smells real, then perhaps the program you are asked to sign up for is worthy of consideration. 

However, if the whole scheme is sold on fallacies that a child could poke a stick through, and its chief proponents cannot possibly believe their own rhetoric, then only a fool would go much further. This is obvious – you don’t buy a used car on a salesman’s insistence that there is no other way to get from your kitchen to your bathroom.

Delegates at the coming World Health Assembly in Geneva are faced with such a choice. In this case, the car salesman is the World Health Organization (WHO), an organization still commanding considerable global respect based on a legacy of sane and solid work some decades ago. 

It also benefits from a persistent misunderstanding that large international organizations would not intentionally lie (they increasingly do, as noted below). The delegates will be voting on the recently completed text of the Pandemic Agreement, part of a broad effort to extract large profits and salaries from an intrinsic human fear of rare causes of death. Fear and confusion distract human minds from rational behavior.

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PREP Act Empowers Gov’t to ‘Administer’ Drugs, Biological Products, Devices to Citizens in Secret

Big Picture: The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act, codified at 42 U.S. Code § 247d–6d, grants the government extraordinary authority to deploy countermeasures during public health emergencies. These powers allow for sweeping actions that include administering drugs, devices, or biological products to populations—without requiring public knowledge or consent. Signed into law by President George W. Bush on December 30, 2005, as part of the Department of Defense appropriations bill (H.R. 2863), the PREP Act was intended to prepare the nation for biological threats but has since raised questions about accountability and transparency.

Focus: The PREP Act’s language reveals how liability immunity, broad discretion for the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), and exemptions from disclosure requirements create an alarming framework for secretive government actions.

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Israel Keeps Emergency Biometrics Measures in Place, More than a Year into Gaza War

Last year, on October 7th, a Hamas attack on Israel plunged the country into a war against Gaza that would bring chaos to the region. But aside from death and destruction, the war has also brought unprecedented access to biometric data to the Israeli government, sparking fears over privacy violations for Israelis.

Just one month after the attacks, the Knesset approved full access to the National Biometric Database for Israeli security forces using expedited legislation. The new access was not to be monitored by other government agencies. Since then, the Ministry of National Security has been regularly extending the temporary order despite the country’s regulators, legal experts and rights organizations arguing against its necessity.

“This legislation was enacted under difficult conditions, time pressure, and uncertainty,” the country’s Biometric Commissioner Naama Ben Zvi told Israeli media outlet Calcalist.

The database holds fingerprint and facial data of approximately 7 million Israelis. In the beginning, authorities argued that the biometric data was critical for identifying the deceased, kidnapped and missing during Hamas’s attack. Alongside the data access, the government also started mandating that citizens applying for an ID card or passport also submit fingerprint and facial biometrics.

According to data from the Biometric Commissioner, however, the fingerprint data was not indispensable. The biometric database helped identify 106 people out of 1,205 casualties, around 11 percent. The individuals were also identified using methods such as DNA, dental records and Israeli Defense Force (IDF) biometric databases which hold records from military conscripts.

“From a national perspective, fingerprints are not a significant game changer,” says Ben Zvi, who also heads the Identity and Biometric Applications Unit at the Israeli National Cyber Directorate. Citizens should be given a choice when submitting biometric data, she adds.

“Taking fingerprints from the entire population infringes on privacy.”

The Biometrics Commissioner is not the only one criticizing the government over privacy.

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FAA Restricting Flight Areas …Will Shoot Them Down If Necessary

The federal government is drawing a line in the sand — or, more accurately, the air — when it comes to the mysterious drones zooming around New Jersey … restricting the areas where they can fly and promising deadly force to those presenting a threat.

The Federal Aviation Administration announced the news this week … putting the ban into effect beginning Wednesday and running through at least January 17, 2025.

According to the new rules, drones are restricted from flying within a nautical mile of specified airspace outlined in the department’s official Notice to Airmen.

These include areas around Jersey City, Elizabeth, Camden, North and South Brunswick and many more highly populated areas of NJ.

We reached out to the FAA … and they say they published “22 Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFRs) prohibiting drone flights over critical New Jersey infrastructure” at the behest of their federal security partners.

According to the FAA, those who violate this airspace could have their drones intercepted and operators themselves could be detained and interviewed.

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Arizona Rejects Restrictions on Governor’s Emergency Powers

Arizonans voted against Proposition 135, a ballot measure that would have enshrined an “Emergency Declarations Amendment” to the constitution limiting the ability of their governor to extend emergency declarations among others. 56.8 percent of Arizona voters went against the proposition, with 68 percent of the vote counted as of press time.

Two years ago, Governor Doug Ducey signed a similar bill limiting the duration of a state of emergency to 30-day increments, which are eligible for extensions up to 120 days without the legislature’s approval. Proposition 135 would have set a hard cap of 30 days for states of emergency and prohibited the governor from extending them without approval from state lawmakers. Absent a decision from the state legislature, the declared state of emergency would automatically end after the allotted 30 days.

Under the ballot measure, certain types of emergencies—like a state of war, fire, and floods—would not be subject to the 30-day limit. Additionally, the legislature would have had the authority to alter or limit the governor’s powers when lawmakers extend an emergency declaration.

Apart from the amendment’s effects on emergency declarations, it also required the governor to call a special session upon the petition of “at least one-third of each house of the legislature,” according to the ballot’s language. Under current law, two-thirds of lawmakers in both chambers must vote in favor of a special session to force the governor to call one. 

Republican lawmakers holding majorities in both chambers voted in 2023 for the amendment to be included on the 2024 ballot; no Democrats voted to include the ballot measure. The bill’s sponsor, state representative Joseph Chaplik (R–Scottsdale), cited the 700-day plus COVID-19 emergency order as a key reason for his support of the measure, according to The Arizona Republic. Rep. Chaplik told The Arizona Republic that the proposition would have allowed special sessions to occur immediately following a governor’s “abuses [of] their emergency power.”

Opponents of Proposition 135 cited concerns over the state’s ability to respond to emergencies. Requiring legislative approval might have slowed down the resources that states of emergency are meant to help allocate. The allocation of state resources, temporary suspension of regulations, enhanced information gathering, and speedy authorization of stricter public safety measures are all reasons states of emergency are declared.  

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Policy Founded on Distorted Evidence

How can decision-makers justify promoting the mammoth undertaking of annual influenza vaccination when the best-quality evidence base is nearly empty?

This was the first question we left you with in the previous post.

In 2008, we examined several policy documents written by influential organisations from WHO, the UK, the US, Germany, Australia, and Canada. The power brokers of influenza prevention created compelling policy arguments for vaccination. For example, the WHO estimated that “vaccination of the elderly reduced the risk of serious complications or death by 70-85%.” What they didn’t point out was that this estimate was based on single studies. In the US, reductions in cases, admissions, and mortality of grandma were central arguments for extending vaccination to healthy children aged 6-23 months.

Therefore, we asked simple questions like who wrote the policy documents, whether there was a methods chapter explaining how the bigwigs reached their conclusions, and whether they had done some quality assessment of the studies or the data. 

We were persistent and looked inside some of these documents. All policy documents contained misquotes, selective citation of text or results, factual mistakes in reporting either estimates of effect or the authors’ conclusions, inconsistent logic, and contradictions.

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The Trojan Horse of “Public Health”

At the recent Mises Institute Supporters Summit in Hilton Head, South Carolina Tom Woods made some flattering comments about Yours Truly regarding my 2000 book coauthored with James T. Bennett entitled
From Pathology to Politics: Public Health in America (Transaction Publishers).  That’s the year 2000, not 2020.  Tom’s comment was the result of his discovery that my coauthor and I had smoked out the dishonesty and left-wing political gimmickry of the “public health establishment” nearly a quarter of a century ago.

The “public health” movement was created shortly after the Civil War with the creation of state and local government “health departments” that concentrated on sanitation issues, disease research, enforcing quarantines, inoculations, controlling mosquitoes, waste disposal, swamp drainage, immunizations, and attempting to control communicable diseases in general.  The American Public Health Association (APHA) was founded in 1872 as a trade association for public health professionals.  It is almost shocking today to read about how post Civil War cities in America were full of such things as pig pens, cesspools, privy vaults, and manure piles!

For the first several decades of its existence the presidents of the APHA were all people with scientific training – surgeons, medical statisticians, chemists, sanitarians, experts in bacteriology, hygiene, anatomy, and even botany.  Great progress was made in controlling diseases and eradicating some of them, like Yellow Fever, and improving mortality rates.  Economic growth surely played an important role as well, enabling Americans to attain better nutrition and living standards in general.

By the 1950s the dire problems that existed in the post-war years had pretty much disappeared, confronting the public health establishment with a major dilemma: With its mission essentially accomplished, how would it continue to justify its existence and its tax-funded support?

Lyndon Johnson’s “great society” explosion of welfare state spending during the 1960s provided the answer.  The federal government’s “Kerner Report” of 1968 on the “root causes” of poverty was fully embraced by the APHA.  In doing so the public health establishment changed its focus entirely from controlling disease to creating a healthy society through welfare statism.  The goal was no longer enhancing individual health but “curing” society’s ills.  That’s where the big tax money was.  Fewer and fewer medical and health professionals were among “public health” professionals, with more and more lobbyists, political activists, sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists.  The public health establishment began crusading for increased welfare payments, a guaranteed annual income “for all Americans,” government housing subsidies, racial hiring quotas, and school busing.

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Massachusetts Governor Uses Emergency Powers To Fast-Track Sweeping Gun-Control Law

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey has signed an emergency preamble to the state’s sweeping gun control bill, fast-tracking its implementation and halting an ongoing effort by gun rights activists to delay its effects.

The law, H.4885, was originally scheduled to take effect on Oct. 23, or 90 days after Healey signed the bill in July, but her decision to proceed with signing the emergency preamble means it goes into effect immediately.

Under Massachusetts law, governors have the authority to issue an emergency preamble to expedite legislation when “the immediate preservation of the public peace, health, safety, or convenience” is deemed necessary.

The law’s expedited enactment was praised by gun control groups but sharply criticized by gun rights advocates, who had hoped to gather enough signatures to delay its implementation until a potential 2026 referendum.

H.4885 expands Massachusetts’ already strict gun regulations, in part as a response to the 2022 Supreme Court ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which affirmed an individual’s right to carry firearms in public for self-defense.

The expedited law includes provisions banning untraceable “ghost guns,” expanding restrictions on “assault-style” firearms and large-capacity magazines, and tightening the state’s “red flag” rules. It also mandates that firearm license applicants pass a standardized safety exam and complete live-fire training, while also providing mental health information to local licensing authorities.

“This gun safety law bans ghost guns, strengthens the Extreme Risk Protection Order statute to keep guns out of the hands of people who are a danger to themselves or others, and invests in violence prevention programs. It is important that these measures go into effect without delay,” Healey said in an Oct. 2 statement to media outlets.

The governor’s decision to fast-track the law has drawn swift condemnation from gun rights organizations. Tody Leary, owner of Cape Cod Gun Works and a leader of the grassroots Civil Rights Coalition, sharply criticized the move, accusing Healey of bypassing the democratic process.

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