Tag: police state

‘An Alamo Moment for the First Amendment’: Congress Holds Hearing on Government Censorship

Censorship by the U.S. government dominated Wednesday’s U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing on the censorship-industrial complex Wednesday.

The often-contentious hearing featured testimony by investigative journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, who released documents as part of the “Twitter Files” that revealed the government’s efforts to censor online speech, including narratives that contradicted official government policy on COVID-19.

Taibbi and Shellenberger’s testimony, and that of Canadian journalist Rupa Subramanya of The Free Press, also focused on the global encroachment of the censorship-industrial complex and the Trump administration’s efforts to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development or USAID, which is accused of funding censorship-related efforts globally.

“USAID is just a tiny piece of the censorship machine” which uses “think tanks, research, fact-checking, anti-disinformation, commercial media scoring and … straight up censorship” to “transform the free press into [a] consensus machine,” Taibbi said.

Shellenberger suggested the “censorship-industrial complex is on the defensive” today, but that “it’s also clear that many governing and media elites worldwide view expanding censorship of online platforms as a must have, not a nice to have feature of global governance.”

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Federal Court Rejects Washington Doctor’s Effort To Legally Access Psilocybin For End-Of-Life Patient Care

A federal appellate court has rejected the latest effort by a Washington State doctor who is seeking to legally use psilocybin to treat cancer patients in end-of-life care, ruling that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) provided a reasonable explanation in denying the doctor’s request.

In an opinion filed on Thursday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected arguments from lawyers for Dr. Sunil Aggarwal and his clinic, the Advanced Integrated Medical Science (AIMS) Institute that DEA’s denial of Aggarwal’s efforts was arbitrary and capricious

“DEA’s decision to deny AIMS’s request was neither arbitrary nor capricious,” the court concluded. “We therefore deny AIMS’s petition for review of the DEA’s decision.”

Aggarwal and AIMS have been working since at least 2020 to find a way to legally obtain psilocybin for patients in palliative care, initially seeking to win permission from regulators under state and federal right-to-try laws.

When DEA rebuffed that request, Aggarwal sued. In early 2022, a federal appellate panel dismissed the lawsuit, opining that the court lacked jurisdiction because DEA’s rejection of Aggarwal’s administrative request didn’t constitute a reviewable agency action.

The latest Ninth Circuit ruling results from Aggarwal’s responses to that ruling. In February 2022, the doctor filed a formal petition with DEA to reschedule psilocybin from Schedule I to Schedule II under the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA)—the denial of which is a reviewable action. He also applied for a regulatory waiver to obtain psilocybin.

DEA denied Aggarwal’s petition in September 2022 and rejected the waiver request the next month. The doctor’s Ninth Circuit case challenged both decisions.

“Following the dismissal of its earlier petition, AIMS returned to DEA with a concrete request. AIMS asked EA to exempt Dr. Aggarwal from registration under the CSA, either by finding that Dr. Aggarwal’s proposed use of psilocybin was not covered by the CSA’s registration requirement or by waiving the registration requirement,” Judge Marsha Berzon, a Clinton appointee, wrote for the court in Thursday’s opinion. “DEA declined to take action, and AIMS again petitioned for review. Because DEA’s response was neither arbitrary nor capricious, we deny AIMS’s petition for review.”

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The Secret History of American Surveillance

From cellphone spying to facial scanning technology to massive data farms, it’s no secret that the U.S. government is gathering loads of personal information on its citizens.

But few remember the origins of our modern surveillance state. Some argue that it was forged over 115 years ago, half a world away in the Philippine Islands.

The story begins in the mid-1870s, when a technological renaissance catapulted America into its first information revolution. Thomas Edison’s quadruplex telegraph and Philo Remington’s typewriter allowed data to be recorded accurately and transmitted quickly. Inventions such as the electrical tabulating machine and the Dewey Decimal System could count, catalog and retrieve huge amounts of information efficiently. Photography was becoming widely accessible, thanks to George Eastman’s roll film, and biometric criminal identification systems such as fingerprinting were adopted from Europe. Our ability to manage, store and transmit data grew by leaps and bounds.

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How to Forge the Spectator Class

My father could disassemble and rebuild a car engine in our garage. I, like many of my generation, was steered toward the ‘civilized’ path – white collar work, climate-controlled offices, and an increasing detachment from the physical world. While I grew up loving sports, memorizing baseball stats with religious devotion, and finding genuine joy in the games, something fundamental has shifted in how men engage with athletics today.

In dimly lit rooms across the nation, millions of men gather every weekend, adorned in jerseys bearing other men’s names – not as a complement to their own achievements, but as a substitute for them. We’ve transformed from a nation of players to a nation of watchers. Like Rome’s bread and circuses, this passive consumption serves to pacify rather than inspire. The games themselves aren’t the problem – they can build character, teach discipline, and provide genuine entertainment. I still love sports, finding genuine joy in the games just as I did memorizing those baseball stats as a kid. But somewhere along the way, I grew up and realized they should complement life’s achievements, not substitute for them. The danger lies in what happens when grown men never make this transition.

A growing segment of young men face an even more insidious form of spectator culture. While their fathers at least watched real athletes achieve real things, many young people now idolize social media personalities and content creators – becoming passive observers of manufactured personas who achieved fame primarily by being watched. They can recite influencer dramas and gaming achievements but don’t know the stories of Solzhenitsyn or have ever built something with their own hands. The virtual has replaced the visceral; the parasocial has replaced the personal.

History shows us a recurring cycle: hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. We find ourselves now in the latter stages of this cycle, where comfort and convenience have bred a generation of observers rather than builders. Our sophisticated entertainment serves as a digital opiate, keeping the masses content while their capacity for meaningful action atrophies.

This transformation isn’t accidental. As I explored in my ‘Engineering Reality‘ series, the systematic reframing of physical fitness as problematic represents a calculated effort to weaken societal resilience. Major media outlets like the Atlantic and MSNBC have published pieces linking physical fitness to right-wing extremism, while academic institutions increasingly frame workout culture as problematic. Even gym ownership has been characterized as a potential indicator of radicalization. The message couldn’t be clearer: individual strength – both literal and metaphorical – threatens the prescribed order.

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Montana GOP Senator’s Bill Would Require People To Register And Pay A $200 Annual Fee To Use Recreational Marijuana

Marijuana reform advocates are sounding the alarm after a Montana GOP senator filed a bill that would require adult-use cannabis consumers to register and pay a $200 annual fee to participate in the legal program that voters approved in 2020.

Sen. Greg Hertz (R) introduced the legislation, SB 255, last week. It would create a registration system similar to what’s in place for medical cannabis in many states—except that this would be for adults in a recreational market, with a significantly higher annual fee.

Adults would need to pay the $200 fee to obtain a cannabis card from the state Cannabis Control Division (CCD). Participants would need to pay that fee each year for renewal under the proposal.

Upon applying for the card, there would be a 60-day period where adults could access marijuana from licensed retailers. But if they don’t pay the fee by the end of that window, the division “shall cancel the temporary marijuana identification card.”

“This is an outrageous attempt to gut the will of the people and re-criminalize cannabis for most Montanans. Voters legalized cannabis for all adults 21 and older,” Karen O’Keefe, director of state policies at the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), told Marijuana Moment on Thursday.

“No other adult-use state forces cannabis consumers to enroll in a state registry, and the people’s initiative explicitly prohibits this surveillance and government overreach,” she said. “Re-criminalizing cannabis for anyone who does not pay $200 per year to register with the state is an affront to Montana voters who made their voices clear when they passed Initiative I-190.”

The text of the bill states that a “marijuana cardholder shall keep the individual’s marijuana identification card in the individual’s immediate possession at all times. The marijuana identification card and a valid photo identification must be displayed on demand of a law enforcement officer, justice of the peace, or city or municipal judge.”

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A New Administration, Same Old Support for FISA

American politicians love to tell the citizenry exactly what they are going to do for them. They claim they will install programs for the poor, increase domestic security, strengthen our international image, and fight tirelessly for their constituencies’ rights. But are these even things people want from their elected leaders?

Democrats and Republicans are typically somewhat on the fence about this question in that they like government intervention and force so long as they are used to further their partisan political ambitions. When it comes to libertarian voters, on the other hand, the answer is likely no. Rather, what most libertarians want is the one thing that a politician will never promise: that they will do absolutely nothing and leave everyone alone!

Even if libertarians are technically in the statistical minority, they have noticed a worrying trend and are using the amplifying power of social media to make it a national debate. More specifically, the internet has now made it almost impossible for the enemies of liberty to hide, and this has led to a growing Massie/Paul-led public referendum against our politicians’ unsavory relationship with warrantless spying. Ideally, this referendum will transcend libertarian circles and will grow so large that it infiltrates the ranks of the Democrats and, more importantly, the Republicans.

To give some context, The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA), which is generally associated with the global War on Terror, was actually around decades before 9/11, even though very few people knew about it. This ambiguity existed, in part, because communications technology before the internet was not nearly as sophisticated or intrusive as it is now. However, after this act became supercharged with the adoption of the Patriot Act in 2001 and then the addition of Section 702 in 2008, its days in the dark were over, and unfortunately, so were our days of assumed privacy.

Even though the internet is waking up to the heinous unconstitutionality of these pieces of legislation, the politicians, on the other hand, don’t seem to be listening, a problem that, ironically, is more prevalent among the self-proclaimed “freedom-loving” MAGA Republicans than it is among the “uni party deep-state” Democrats.

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The Disturbing Truth About the Home You Think You Own

The North Dakota Referendum That Could Have Changed Everything

In 2012, North Dakota held a referendum to become the first US state to abolish property taxes.

The measure aimed to amend the state constitution, eliminating property taxes and requiring the government to find alternative revenue sources.

Proponents argued that property taxes were unnecessary since North Dakota already had ample income from state taxes and oil revenues. They also pointed out that property taxes disproportionately burdened low-income homeowners and senior citizens. Eliminating them, they claimed, would provide financial relief, boost economic growth, and attract businesses and residents.

However, a coalition of bureaucrats and special interest groups fought against the referendum.

In the end, voters overwhelmingly rejected the measure—78% chose to keep their property taxes.

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GOP Florida Lawmaker Wonders If State’s Medical Marijuana Program Is ‘Causing More Harm Than Good’

With nearly 900,000 registered patients, Florida has the largest medical marijuana program in the country. While campaigning against a proposed constitutional amendment that would have legalized recreational cannabis last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) hailed the medical program, boasting that he had legalized smokeable weed in the state in 2019.

But that doesn’t mean the Florida GOP-controlled legislature is all in with medical marijuana, and on Tuesday one House member asked a state doctor charged with analyzing the effectiveness of cannabis as medicine if its use by Floridians poses more of a risk than a benefit.

“You’ve made it very clear that there needs to be more research across the gamut of this area, but you’ve also made it clear that a lot of the research that you do have shows this program to be of questionable medical value,” said Northeast Florida Republican Dean Black to Dr. Almut Winterstein, a professor in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Florida and director of the Consortium for Medical Marijuana Outcomes Research.

“My question is, do you fear that we’re causing more harm than good?”

Winterstein replied that the question illuminated the “conundrum” that exists when it comes to the medical efficacy of cannabis, which because it is listed as a Schedule I controlled substance by the federal government has always had restrictions placed on research. (The Biden administration proposed last year to reclassify the substance as a Schedule III controlled substance).

“That is concerning,” she said in response to Black’s query. “That doesn’t mean that there are not patients who might massively benefit from this, but we haven’t defined the benefit of this.”

In her presentation to the House Professions & Programs Subcommittee, Winterstein reported rapid growth among young adults up to age 25 in Florida in listing anxiety as the medical condition motivating them to seek a medical marijuana prescription. She said that was “fairly strong evidence that marijuana attacks the developing brain negatively—specifically, cognitively.”

But she said that was very different than looking at patients suffering from chronic pain or other medical conditions. 

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Alberta to impose EV tax starting next Thursday

Starting February 13, Alberta’s electric car drivers will be subject to an EV tax. A $200 surcharge will be added to their tab when they renew their annual registration.

“Owners of electric vehicles use the same roads as other Albertan drivers,” said Alberta’s Minister of Service and Red Tape Reduction, Dale Nally. “It’s only fair they contribute to public services, including those that ensure the continued safety and upkeep of Alberta’s roads.”

The province says it addresses concerns on tax fairness, according to a prior government news release, with drivers of internal combustion engine vehicles paying similar fuel tax charges each year. 

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UK Government Secretly Orders Apple to Build Global iCloud Backdoor, Threatening Digital Privacy Worldwide

Imagine waking up one morning to find out your government has demanded the master key to every digital iPhone lock on Earth — without telling anyone. That’s exactly what British security officials have tried to pull off, secretly ordering Apple to build a backdoor into iCloud that would allow them to decrypt any user’s data, anywhere in the world. Yes, not just suspected criminals, not just UK citizens — everyone. And they don’t even want Apple to talk about it.

This breathtakingly authoritarian stunt, first reported by The Washington Post, is one of the most aggressive attempts to dismantle digital privacy ever attempted by a so-called Western democracy. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect from regimes that plaster their leader’s face on every street corner, not from a country that still pretends to believe in civil liberties.

This isn’t about catching a single terrorist or cracking a single case. No, this order — issued in secret last month by Keir Starmer’s Labour government — demands universal decryption capabilities, effectively turning Apple into a surveillance arm of the UK government. Forget warrants, forget oversight, forget even the pretense of targeted investigations. If this order were obeyed, British authorities would have the power to rifle through anyone’s iCloud account at will, no justification required.

The officials pushing for this monstrosity are hiding behind the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, a law so Orwellian it’s lovingly referred to as the “Snoopers’ Charter.” This piece of legislative overreach forces tech companies to comply with government spying requests while making it illegal to even disclose that such demands have been made. It’s the surveillance state’s dream—limitless power, zero accountability.

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