Tag: land of the free

California Officials Force Elderly Couple To Dismantle Home, Citing Blocked Ocean Views

The two-story mobile home that Michael and Susan Christian own and live in in the Orange County beach community of San Clemente, California, isn’t blighted, dangerous, ugly, or even unpopular with the neighbors.

But it is a little too tall, according to state officials with the California Coastal Commission.

For over a decade, the commission—a state agency with the final say over most development on the California coast—has been arguing that the Christians’ addition of a second story to their home obscures ocean views from a nearby walking trail. It also argued the couple added that second story without getting the required permits from the commission.

Late last month, a California appeals court sided with the commission, ruling that the Christians must comply with its demands to shrink their house from its current 22 feet in height down to 16 feet. The Christians’ representatives say that will require them to completely tear down and rebuild the home.

“They’re an elderly couple. They’re in their 70s. They have all kinds of health issues. This is their only home; they live in it,” says Lee Andelin, one of the Christians’ lawyers. Dismantling the home “is going to cost them millions of dollars, for what? There’s not a broader benefit for the public.”

Andelin argues the ruling will embolden the commission to place even more restrictions on coastal homeowners’ ability to improve their properties.

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Connecticut Marijuana Retailers Can Open On Christmas And New Year’s, But Alcohol Stores Must Close

People in Connecticut can’t legally buy alcohol on Christmas or New Year’s Day, the state Department of Consumer Protection reminded residents this week—but cannabis is A-OK.

“If you choose to consume alcohol with your holiday celebrations, be sure to make those purchases ahead of time, and, of course, please drink responsibly,” Department of Consumer Protection (DPC) Commissioner Bryan T. Cafferelli said in a statement on Wednesday. “And, because we regulate many things you may be wondering about, Connecticut Law does not prohibit the sale of cannabis, or limit your ability to place wagers during the holidays.”

“No matter how you choose to spend the holidays,” he added, “please know your limit, arrange designated drivers and be respectful of the establishments and communities where you celebrate.”

On both New Year’s and Christmas Day, state law prohibits package stores from opening, and grocery stores are barred from selling beer. To-go sales of liquor are also banned.

“Hours for cannabis licensees,” said the Department of Consumer Protection, “are unaffected.”

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Government tyranny comes to Main Street, with the feds more powerful than ever

Americans today have the “freedom” to be fleeced, censored, wiretapped, injected, disarmed, detained, groped and maybe shot by government agents.

Politicians are hell-bent on protecting citizens against everything except Uncle Sam.

“We live in a world in which everything has been criminalized,” warned Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.

There are now more than 5,200 separate federal criminal offenses and tens of thousands of state and local crimes.

Thanks to the Supreme Court, police can lock up anyone accused of “even a very minor criminal offense,” such as an unbuckled seatbelt.

The Founding Fathers saw property rights as “the guardian of every other right.”

But today’s politicians never lack a pretext for plundering private citizens.

Federal law-enforcement agencies arbitrarily confiscate more property from Americans each year (without criminal convictions) than all the burglars steal nationwide.

The IRS pilfered more cash from private bank accounts because of alleged paperwork errors than the total bank robbers looted nationwide.

Government decrees are blighting more lives than ever before.

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Ohio GOP Senate President Outlines Plan To Amend Voter-Approved Marijuana Law Next Week, Days Before Legalization Takes Effect

Ohio’s Republican Senate president says his chamber will take the first step toward amending a voter-approved marijuana legalization law at the beginning of next week, with just days left before key provisions of the initiated statute take effect. But the House speaker, for his part, still says he doesn’t necessarily see the urgency.

GOP legislative leaders and Gov. Mike DeWine (R) have been discussing revisions to the cannabis statute ever since voters passed the reform at the ballot last month, with the main focus being on possible changes to provisions concerning tax revenue,  youth prevention and impaired driving.

Two Republican-led bills to amend the legalization law have been introduced so far, but Senate President Matt Huffman (R) said the plan is to take up separate, unrelated House-passed legislation in the Senate General Government Committee on Monday, attach yet-to-be-seen cannabis amendments as an emergency clause and advance the proposal on the floor on Wednesday. The House would then need to concur with the changes.

An emergency clause would mean the bill would require a two-thirds vote instead of a simple majority to pass, but it’d mean the legislation would take effect immediately rather than after a standard 90-day period following signature by the governor. That seems to be the only option if lawmakers want to revise the marijuana law before possession and cultivation become legal on Thursday.

“It would be better for people going forward to know what the law is than people begin spending money or taking actions and then the law changes six months from now or 90 days, you know, a year from now,” Huffman told WCMH.

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Proposed L.A. Ordinance Would Require Airbnb Hosts To Get Police Permission To Operate

Los Angeles Airbnb hosts would need permission from the police to do business under an ordinance being considered by the Los Angeles City Council.

A “responsible hotel” ordinance that earned the unanimous support of the council Tuesday would require hotel and short-term rental operators to obtain a police permit each year to do business. Getting that permit, in turn, would require a criminal background check, the payment of fees totaling hundreds of dollars, and possibly submitting fingerprints to the police.

The new regulations come as part of a “compromise” between hotel owners and the hotel workers union Unite Here Local 11, which has been engaged in strikes against individual hotels over this past year.

One of the union’s demands had been that hotel owners support an initiative the union placed on the Los Angeles city ballot in March 2024 that, if passed, would require hotels to give vacant rooms to the homeless.

In exchange for the passage of Tuesday’s ordinance, the union has agreed to pull that initiative from the ballot.

The bulk of the Responsible Hotel Ordinance layers additional regulations on new hotel developments.

It requires that city planning officials, before issuing permits for new hotels, study how the new hotel’s employees will impact housing, public transit, and child care services.

Per the ordinance, city planning officials will also have to produce findings on whether the new hotel is hiring from the surrounding neighborhood as a means of reducing additional traffic, whether it’s agreed to support nearby small businesses, whether it encourages its employees to ride transit or bike to work, and whether the hotel will negatively impact affordable and rent-controlled housing.

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Teenage Trick-Or-Treaters Are Too Scary For These Cities

Every year, it seems like the controversies surrounding Halloween keep getting stupider.

Last year, fears about “rainbow fentanyl” caused panic over brightly colored pills supposedly designed as candy. This year, parents online expressed horror over the “switch witch” (a clever, if cruel way to throw away your kid’s candy haul), and a New Jersey school district announced its baffling decision to cancel Halloween celebrations over concern for the minority of kids who don’t celebrate the holiday.

But there’s also another Halloween debate that has long gotten out of hand: How old is too old to go trick-or-treating? While this seems like a question for parents, some local governments have handed down their own decrees about just who gets to participate in Halloween candy collecting.

According to a recent NPR story, kids over 14 in Chesapeake, Virginia, caught trick-or-treating can be charged with a misdemeanor. Until 2019, they apparently faced six months in jail.

In nearby Norfolk, Suffolk, Portsmouth, and Virginia Beach, kids over 12 are barred from trick-or-treating. Rayne, Louisiana, and Jacksonville, Illinois, also ban teenage trick-or-treaters. In Belleville, Illinois, they can get slapped with a $1,000 fine.

How often these laws are enforced is unclear. However, it doesn’t seem like local police departments are rigorously verifying the age of trick-or-treaters.

“Officers do not spend Halloween night ‘carding’ trick-or-treaters, nor are they actively seeking ‘over age’ participants,” one Chesapeake spokesperson told Today in 2019.

It’s not entirely clear why these cities have enacted age limits on trick-or-treating; the most common—though often vaguely phrased—reasoning seems to be an attempt to halt teenage crime.

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This Is Not Freedom, America: The Profit Incentives Driving the American Police State

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” ― Frédéric Bastiat, French economist

Pay no heed to the circus politics coming out of Washington, DC. It’s just more of the same grandstanding by tone-deaf politicians oblivious to the plight of the citizenry.

Don’t allow yourselves to be distracted by the competing news headlines cataloging the antics of the ruling classes. While they are full of sound and fury, they are utterly lacking in substance.

Tune out the blaring noise of meaningless babble. It is intended to drown out the very real menace of a government which is consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population.

Focus instead on the steady march of the police state at both the national, state and local levels, and the essential freedoms that are being trampled underfoot in its single-minded pursuit of power.

While the overt and costly signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government are all around us—warrantless surveillance of Americans’ private phone and email conversations by the FBI, NSA, etc.; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling—you rarely hear anything about them from the politicians, the corporations or the news media.

So what’s behind the blackout of real news?

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Sales Data Indicate That Restrictions on Flavored Vaping Products Encourage Smoking

Legal restrictions on the flavors of nicotine vaping products are associated with increased cigarette purchases, according to a new paper that analyzes retail sales data from 44 states. For each fewer 0.7-milliliter nicotine pod sold in jurisdictions with such policies, the analysis found, consumers bought 15 more cigarettes. “That tradeoff,” the authors note, “equates to over a pack more cigarettes per pod for the size of current leading products” such as the Vuse Alto, which uses 1.8-milliliter pods.

The substitution effect identified by this study underlines the folly of trying to protect public health by deterring the use of electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS), which are far less hazardous than combustible cigarettes. “We find that ENDS flavor policies reduce flavored ENDS sales as intended, but also increase cigarette sales across age groups,” Yale public health researcher Abigail Friedman and her collaborators report. “As cigarettes are much more lethal than ENDS, the high rate of substitution estimated here suggests that, on net, any population health benefits of ENDS flavor policies are likely small or even negative.”

Friedman et al. identified 15 state and 279 local flavor restrictions that took effect during the study period—January 7, 2018, through March 26, 2023. Those policies included both outright bans on ENDS flavors other than tobacco and laws that limited sales of such products to specialty stores such as vape shops and tobacconists. The study’s sales data came from Information Resources Incorporated, which collects checkout numbers from convenience stores, supermarkets, drug stores, discount stores, and gas stations.

“ENDS sales fall and cigarette sales rise as a greater percentage of state residents is subject to policies restricting flavored ENDS sales,” Friedman et al. report. “Effects are in the same direction for policies prohibiting all ENDS sales (i.e., flavored and unflavored), consistent with substitution.” These effects are “larger in the long-run; that is, for policies in effect a year or longer,” the researchers note. They add that “separating ENDS flavor prohibitions from less restrictive policies limiting flavored ENDS sales to particular types of retailers reveals that both policies yield reductions in ENDS sales and increases in cigarette sales once in effect for at least a year.”

The relationship between reduced ENDS sales and increased cigarette sales, the study found, “holds across cigarette product age profiles, including for brands disproportionately used by underage youth.” Menthol brands accounted for 29 percent of the increase in cigarette sales, while standard cigarettes accounted for 71 percent, which “indicates that the observed substitution response to ENDS flavor policies cannot be attributed to menthol cigarettes’ availability” or “fully counteracted by menthol cigarette sales prohibitions.”

These findings, Friedman et al. note, are consistent with “results from 16 of 18 other studies assessing cigarette use following adoptions of minimum legal sales age laws for ENDS, ENDS tax rate increases, and advertising restrictions.” They are also consistent with prior studies suggesting that ENDS flavor restrictions boost smoking rates. “In other words,” the authors say, “policies making ENDS more expensive, less accessible, or less appealing appear to incentivize substitution towards cigarettes.”

Who could have predicted that? Lots of people, starting with all the ex-smokers who have switched to vaping and overwhelmingly prefer the flavors that politicians portray as an intolerable threat to the youth of America. Savvy tobacco control experts likewise have been warning legislators and regulators for years that policies aimed at discouraging underage vaping could inadvertently lead to more smoking-related diseases and deaths.

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They Want to Bring Back the Draft

Here is a breakdown of an article from the Parameters Autumn issue, an official US Army War College newsletter. Great stuff here. A basic premise:

An American Army still grappling with the lessons from Afghanistan must embrace the Russo-Ukrainian conflict as an opportunity to drive progress toward the creation of a force and strategic direction as forward-thinking and formidable as the one TRADOC built for the United States ahead of Operation Desert Storm. In fall 2022, a team of faculty and students at the US Army War College assembled around this call to action. The team believed the Russia-Ukraine War unfolding in front of them was a wake-up call for the Army across the traditional warfighting functions that also required a culture change across the Army’s education, training, and doctrine enterprise to embrace new lessons learned and to drive change across all echelons of the Army.

And what have they been learning?

Twenty years of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations in the Middle East, largely enabled by air, signals, and electromagnetic dominance, generated chains of command reliant on perfect, uncontested communication lines and an extraordinary and accurate common operating picture of the battlefield broadcast in real time to co-located staff in large Joint Operations Centers. The Russia-Ukraine War makes it clear that the electromagnetic signature emitted from the command posts of the past 20 years cannot survive against the pace and precision of an adversary who possesses sensor-based technologies, electronic warfare, and unmanned aerial systems or has access to satellite imagery; this includes nearly every state or nonstate actor the United States might find itself fighting in the near future. The Army must focus on developing command-and-control systems and mobile command posts that enable continuous movement, allow distributed collaboration, and synchronize across all warfighting functions to minimize electronic signature. Ukrainian battalion command posts reportedly consist of seven soldiers who dig in and jump twice daily; while that standard will be hard for the US Army to achieve, it points in a very different direction than the one we have been following for two decades of hardened command posts.

Guess what: Russia and China have all the capabilities listed above.

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14 GOP Congressional Lawmakers Tell DEA To Keep Marijuana In Schedule I And ‘Reject’ Top Health Agency’s Recommendation

A coalition of 14 Republican congressional lawmakers is urging the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to “reject” the top federal health agency’s recommendation to reschedule marijuana and instead keep it in the most restrictive category under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

In a letter sent to DEA Administrator Anne Milgram on Monday, Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) and Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) led a dozen other colleagues in both chambers in arguing that any decision to reschedule cannabis “should be based on proven facts and science—not popular opinion, changes in state laws, or the preferred policy of an administration.”

Of course, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has repeatedly emphasized that its review into marijuana scheduling, directed by President Joe Biden late last year, was science-based. And after 11 months of investigation, it has recommended that marijuana be placed in Schedule III. Milgram has also made clear that DEA’s review will follow the science.

The eight GOP senators and six House members evidently distrust the motives behind the HHS recommendation, however, and they argued in the letter, first reported by The Washington Stand, that the current “research, science, and trends support the case that marijuana should remain a Schedule I drug.”

They pointed to National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) data on rates of cannabis use disorder and raised concerns about increased THC potency of marijuana products, stating that these “facts indicate that marijuana has a high potential for abuse and that the risk is only increasing.”  For what it’s worth, NIDA also reportedly signed off the HHS rescheduling recommendation before it was sent to DEA.

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