Tag: nanny state

Kamala’s VP Wannabe Tim Walz Levied WHOPPING 95% Tax on Zyn.

Governor Tim Walz (D-MN), tapped as Kamala Harris‘s running mate in the upcoming presidential election, approved an astonishing 95 percent tax on Zyn, the popular tobacco-free nicotine product, in the North Star State this year. Previously, the tax on “moist snuff” did not include Zyn, as it contains no tobacco, but the law was amended to gouge users of Zyn and “similar tobacco-free product[s] containing nicotine” in May.

The tax on cigars, including premium cigars, smoking tobacco, chewing tobacco, e-cigarettes, and vapor products in Minnesota is also set at 95 percent.

As Governor, Walz has created a new payroll tax, raised taxes on retail deliveries, motor vehicle sales, corporate income tax, and net investment income, and reduced itemized deductions. He also greenlit local sales and purchase taxes in the seven-county metro area surrounding the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

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Free drink refills could be banned in Wales

Free drink refills could be banned at restaurants and cafes as part of new proposals by the Welsh government.

Health Secretary Eluned Morgan has launched a consultation to restrict “promotions of food products high in fat, sugar and salt”.

It also proposes to restrict retailers from putting forward offers, such as buy one get one free, on unhealthy food.

The Welsh government said it was “supporting people in Wales to make the healthy choice”.

The consultation outlines proposed legislation which the Welsh government said was “taking action to improve our food environment”.

  • It includes a proposal to prohibit retailers from offering free drink refills, which many high street restaurants including Nando’s and Five Guys offer.
  • Another proposal will prevent retailers offering promotions, including buy-one-get-one-free and three-for-two offers on unhealthy food products.
  • A third proposal will bar retailers from placing high fat, sugar and salt food products in certain locations in stores, including entrances, end of aisles and checkout or queueing areas.
  • It will also apply to online equivalents including website entry pages, shopping basket and payment pages.

The Welsh government said food products with poor nutritional value were promoted more than healthier products, which then influenced the food and drink people buy.

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FTC Opens a Backdoor Route to Age Verification on Social Media

I hadn’t heard of the app NGL until recently. But that’s not surprising. The anonymous questions app seems to be largely popular among teens.

Bark, the maker of parental content-monitoring software, calls NGL “a recipe for drama” and cyberbullying. But it seems like a fairly standard social media offering, allowing users to post questions or prompts and receive anonymous responses.

Now, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has ordered NGL to ban users under age 18.

The FTC and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office say NGL “unfairly” marketed the app to minors. “NGL marketed its app to kids and teens despite knowing that it was exposing them to cyberbullying and harassment,” FTC Chair Lina M. Khan said.

To settle the lawsuit, the agency is not only making NGL pay $5 million, it’s also requiring the app to ban those under age 18 from using it.

This seems to me like a worrying development.

An administrative agency ordering a social media app to ban minors is effectively a backdoor way to accomplish what Congress has been failing to mandate legislatively and what courts have been rejecting when state lawmakers do it.

Granted, the FTC does not seem to be requiring NGL to check IDs. It’s merely “required to implement a neutral age gate that prevents new and current users from accessing the app if they indicate that they are under 18,” per the FTC’s press release.

But this is still the FTC setting minimum age requirements for some social media use, circumventing both parental and legislative authority.

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The UN Smothers the Peoples with Compassion

The United Nations (UN) Secretariat will hold the next Summit of the Future in New York on 22-23 September 2024. It is a vast political program covering the noblest of causes including poverty reduction, human rights, environment, climate change, development, and the welfare and rights of children, youth, and women. World leaders are expected to endorse a declaratory Pact for the Future, and commit to act toward its realization.

It all looks wonderful. As in days of old, the rich, powerful, and entitled are coming to rescue us from ourselves and make us live better lives. Freedom, after all, is intrinsically unsafe.

This is the first in a series that will look at the plans of the UN system designing and implementing this new agenda, covering implications for global health, economic development, and human rights.

Climate and Health at the WHO: Building the Authoritarian Dream

Amidst all the hype and posturing regarding the negotiations on pandemic texts at the recent 77th World Health Assembly (WHA) in Geneva (Switzerland), perhaps the most consequential resolution before the WHA slipped through, approved, but virtually unnoticed. The Resolution WHA77.14 on Climate Change and Health was approved without debate, opening the door for the World Health Organization (WHO) ─ a UN specialized agency ─ to claim a broad swath of normal human activity as a potential threat to health, and therefore coming under the purview of the WHO’s detached business-class bureaucrats.

It was highlighted by a Strategic Roundtable on “Climate change and health: a global vision for joint action,” where speakers, moderated by the Lancet’s Editor-in-Chief Richard Horton, included WHO Director-General (DG) Tedros Ghebreyesus, former US Vice President Al Gore (by video message), and CEO of the 28th Climate Conference of States Parties Adnan Amin. 

The Resolution was proposed by a coalition of 16 countries (Barbados, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Fiji, Georgia, Kenya, Moldova, Monaco, Netherlands, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Slovenia, United Arab Emirates, and the UK) and passed without changes, mandating the DG to: i) develop a “results-based, needs-oriented and capabilities-driven global WHO plan of action on climate change and health,” ii) serve as a global leader in the field of climate change and health by establishing a WHO Roadmap to Net Zero by 2030, and iii) report back to future WHA sessions.

United Nations System’s “Newspeak” on Climate Change

There is little surprise in this. It is another predictable move on the global climate chessboard. In the last decade, activities and documents from the UN system have increasingly included climate change as a “newspeak” to signal full compliance with the official narrative. 

The head of the UN system, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, is known for pushing the narrative further. In 2019, he posed in water for a picture for Time Magazine’s coverage on “Our sinking planet.” Last summer, he announced that “the era of global warming has ended…the era of global boiling has arrived.”

On 2024 World Environment Day (5th June), he doubled down on his rhetoric: “In the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs. We are the meteor. We are not only in danger. We are the danger.” We are, it appears, a poison on our planet.

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Another “vaccine passport” bill FAILS to pass in New York where medical legislation is disguised so the nanny-state can impose vaccine mandates later

New York is the city and state where legislation to remove medical rights and privacy masquerades as “options” so the medical-police-state can later impose vaccine mandates and perform gender mutilation surgery on kids without parental consent. The latest attempt to remove medical privacy in New York comes as lawmakers tried to make it so that anyone 19 and older must “opt out” of having their vaccination information automatically recorded and shared with health departments on their vaccine registry. Currently, only patients under 19 years of age have this data in registries, as required by healthcare providers.

A civil rights attorney, Sujata Gibson, who represents New York plaintiffs who challenge vaccine mandates, calls this new legislation a “Trojan Horse” that paves the way for broader mandates, saying “The only reason to know every single vaccine given to adults in New York is to know who did not get them.” That type of database would be the “central nervous system” she said, for what would surely amount to a “state-wide digital vaccine passport system.”

Vaccine registries can lead directly to vaccine mandates and medical-police-state tyranny

If you did not recognize it, Big Pharma’s main goal of the whole pandemic was to get as many people injected with cell-mutating mRNA “technology” as possible, then you got swept up by the vax cult frenzy, like 270 million other Americans. The mad, mad push is far from over, even though the “novel” virus still barely lingers, supposedly. In New York, right now, vaccine-cult legislators are trying to get everybody on a database, vaccinated or not, so they can plan better for the next “plandemic.”

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Parents, Not Lax Regulation, To Blame for Tweens’ Excessive Screen Time

Instead of calling on the federal government to regulate tween and teen use of social media, perhaps we should look a little closer to home. A new study suggests parental policies and habits around screens are a significant predictor of problematic use among adolescents.

One major finding: Kids getting too much “screen time” are more likely to have parents who get too much screen time.

“One of the biggest predictors of adolescents’ screen use is their parents’ screen use,” pediatrician and lead study author Jason Nagata told The Washington Post.

This was a massive study looking at the screen habits of more than 10,000 kids ages 12 and 13. Published in the journal Pediatric Research, the study—”Associations between media parenting practices and early adolescent screen use”—looked at how often parents used cellphones or other screens around their kids and family policies surrounding technology, such as whether screens were often employed during meal times (35.6 percent said yes), whether kids had access to screens in their bedrooms (46.2 percent said yes), and whether parents monitored and/or limited screen time during the week (67.4 percent and 76.2 percent said yes). Researchers also examined how often the children of these parents engaged in tech-based activities (including using social media, playing video games, and being on a cell phone generally) and how this affected various aspects of their lives.

The researchers found that “parent screen use, family mealtime screen use, and bedroom screen use were associated with greater adolescent screen time and problematic social media, video game, and mobile phone use.”

In addition, “parental use of screens to control behavior (e.g., as a reward or punishment) was associated with higher screen time and greater problematic video game use.”

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California’s Tortilla Bill Threatens To Flatten Small Businesses

California famously became the first state to ban foie gras in 2004. Now, the Golden State is targeting another culinary tradition: the handmade tortilla. A new bill in Sacramento, if passed, would mandate adding folic acid to corn masa flour. Pushed under the auspices of public health, the costs of this well-intentioned idea—as always—will disproportionately fall on small businesses. 

Assembly Bill 1830, introduced by Assemblymember Joaquin Arambula (D–Fresno), would require all masa manufacturers to fortify their products with folic acid. This will affect producers of tortillas, as well as producers of pupusas, tamales, and taco shells, to name just a few. 

The rationale is based on research showing that the ingestion of folic acid by women of reproductive age can reduce neural tube birth defects, such as spina bifida and anencephaly. 

Since 1998, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has mandated folic acid fortification in enriched flours, which has resulted in a 35 percent reduction in neural tube birth defects, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

However, the FDA mandate does not apply to unenriched grain or corn masa flour. Evidence suggests that Latina mothers have lower folic acid intake than other demographics, resulting in higher rates of birth defects. California Department of Public Health data show only 28 percent of Latinas reported taking folic acid before pregnancy, compared to 46 percent of white women. A 2009 CDC study suggested that mandatory fortification of masa could boost folic acid intake by up to 20 percent among Mexican Americans. 

In 2016, the FDA implemented rules that allowed producers of masa flour to voluntarily add folic acid to their products. A 2023 report by the Center for Science in the Public Interest found that only 14 percent of masa products contained folic acid, prompting calls for mandatory fortification. 

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A Nanny State Idiocracy: A Tale of Too Many Laws and Too Little Freedom

We are caught in a vicious cycle of too many laws, too many cops, and too little freedom.

It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or a Nanny State Idiocracy.

Whatever the label, this overbearing despotism is what happens when government representatives (those elected and appointed to work for us) adopt the authoritarian notion that the government knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives.

The government’s bureaucratic attempts at muscle-flexing by way of overregulation and overcriminalization have reached such outrageous limits that federal and state governments now require on penalty of a fine that individuals apply for permission before they can grow exotic orchids, host elaborate dinner parties, gather friends in one’s home for Bible studies, give coffee to the homeless, let their kids manage a lemonade stand, keep chickens as pets, or braid someone’s hair, as ludicrous as that may seem.

As the Regulatory Transparency Project explains, “There are over 70 federal regulatory agencies, employing hundreds of thousands of people to write and implement regulations. Every year, they issue about 3,500 new rules, and the regulatory code now is over 168,000 pages long.”

In his CrimeADay Twitter feed, Mike Chase highlights some of the more arcane and inane laws that render us all guilty of violating some law or other.

As Chase notes, it’s against the law to try to make an unreasonable noise while a horse is passing by in a national park; to leave Michigan with a turkey that was hunted with a drone; to refill a liquor bottle with different liquor than it had in it when it was originally filled; to offer to buy swan feathers so you can make a woman’s hat with them; to enter a design in the Federal Duck Stamp contest if waterfowl are not the dominant feature of the design; to transport a cougar without a cougar license; to sell spray deodorant without telling people to avoid spraying it in their eyes; and to transport “meat loaf” unless it’s in loaf form.

In such a society, we are all petty criminals.

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Second California Senate Committee Approves Bill To Legalize Psychedelic Service Centers

A second California Senate committee has approved a bill to legalize psychedelic service centers where adults 21 and older could access psilocybin, MDMA, mescaline and DMT in a supervised environment with trained facilitators.

About a week after an initial panel cleared the legislation, the Senate Public Safety Committee passed the measure from Sen. Scott Wiener (D) in a 3-2 vote on Tuesday. It next heads to the Appropriations Committee.

The “Regulated Therapeutic Access to Psychedelics Act” has been drafted in a way that’s meant to be responsive to concerns voiced by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) last year when he vetoed a broader proposal that included provisions to legalize low-level possession of substances such as psilocybin.

Instead, the new bill that’s now being unveiled would provide regulated access to psychedelics in a facilitated setting, without removing criminal penalties for possession outside of that context. It does not lay out any specific qualifying medical conditions that a person must have in order to access the services.

The measure had already undergone a series of mostly technical amendments before reaching committee. Wiener also agreed to revise the legislation at last week’s hearing to make it so psychedelics facilitators would need to have an existing professional health license, such as those for psychiatrists, social workers, drug and alcohol counselors and nurse practitioners.

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Expanding the Drug War To Include Tobacco Would Be a Big Mistake

Last month, New Zealand scrapped a law that would have gradually prohibited tobacco products by banning sales to anyone born after 2008. But Brookline, a wealthy Boston suburb, will implement a similar scheme now that the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (SJC) has cleared the way.

Brookline’s bylaw, which bans sales of “tobacco or e-cigarette products” to anyone born after 1999, is unlikely to have much practical impact, since the town is surrounded by municipalities where such sales remain legal. But it reflects a broader transition from regulation to prohibition among progressives who seem to have forgotten the lessons of the war on drugs.

The local merchants who challenged Brookline’s ban argued that it was preempted by a state law that sets 21 as the minimum purchase age for tobacco products. They also claimed the bylaw violates the Massachusetts Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection by arbitrarily discriminating against adults based on their birthdates.

The SJC rejected both arguments in a decision published on Friday. The court concluded that state legislators had left local officials free to impose additional sales restrictions. And since birthdate-based distinctions do not involve “a suspect classification,” it said, Brookline’s bylaw is constitutional because it is “rationally related to the town’s legitimate interest in mitigating tobacco use overall and in particular by minors.”

The striking aspect of Brookline’s law, of course, is that it applies to adults as well as minors. It currently covers residents in their 20s and eventually will apply to middle-aged and elderly consumers as well.

Since anyone 21 or older who wants to buy tobacco or vaping products can still legally do so across the border in Boston, Cambridge, or Newton, Brookline’s ban looks more like an exercise in virtue signaling than a serious attempt to reduce consumption. The same could be said of the outright bans on tobacco sales that two other wealthy and supposedly enlightened enclaves, Beverly Hills and Manhattan Beach, enacted in 2019 and 2020, respectively.

The Beverly Hills ban makes exceptions for hotels and cigar lounges, and both cities border jurisdictions where tobacco sales are still allowed. But even as moral statements, these edicts are flagrantly illiberal, standing for the proposition that adults cannot be trusted to decide for themselves which psychoactive substances they want to consume.

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