Tag: police state

Net Zero Will Boost the Economy? Pull the Other One

According to a recent Bloomberg article, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) has urged the next Government to “put Net Zero at the heart of its economic plans” in order to achieve a “£57 billion economic boost by going green”. The article draws from a recent speech by CBI Chief Exec Rain Newton-Smith, in which she argued that “the next Government can’t be pro-growth and deliver for our people, planet and communities, without being pro-green”. This claim is in turn based on an analysis from CBI Economics, “which found that the U.K.’s Net Zero sector grew by 9% in 2023, a year when the U.K. economy fell into technical recession”.

If it is true, it is remarkable, surely, that a sector of the U.K. economy could grow at such a rate, despite headwinds. And it would indeed be an extremely foolish Government that ignored such a stark metric. But the CBI has form in making big statements about the direction that U.K. Governments should take, including most famously an injunction that Britain should ditch the pound and join the Eurozone – a policy position which Vote Leave later revealed likely to be related to the fact that “12% of the CBI’s retained income” came from the European Commission. “Since 2009, the CBI has received £7,031,797 from 140 taxpayer-funded public sector bodies in membership fees,” explained Vote Leave in 2015. Might funding sources also explain its arguments for a doubling down on Net Zero policy?

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Net Zero will Destroy You, Your Family and Everything You Love

The drive towards Net Zero is fuelled by the climate change myth and is based on a delicately balanced raft of pseudoscientific evidence and fake news material which are used by professional propagandists and skilled conspirators to sustain the notion that fossil fuels are threatening our world and our very existence.

The myth they have created has been propagated with absurd enthusiasm by small but vocal teams of compliant and easily led enthusiasts, most of whom almost certainly believe that the lies they have been told are the truth and that if we do not make substantive changes to our way of life then we have no future. They’ve been taught that the seas will boil and rise up to engulf the land, life as we have known it will become impossible and the human race will be doomed.

As a result of this nonsensical belief (which is no better established in science than the equally absurd but far less dangerous and damaging theories that the Earth is flat, there are no germs and that gravity does not exist) governments around the world now argue that they have no choice but to take drastic action to save us from doom. Aided and abetted by gullible, easily led, virtue-signalling leaders of charities, lobby groups, bankers and investment groups, action is, therefore, being taken to halt the use of all fossil fuels and to change every aspect of the way we live.

The Supreme Court in the UK has ruled that a local council should have considered the climate impact of burning oil before allowing new wells. This will put all future oil and gas projects in doubt both in the UK and in the EU. A Swiss woman won a victory at the European Court of Human Rights to force Switzerland to do more to deal with the myth of climate change. This is all insanity.

The best joke of the century so far is that China is selling solar panels and electric vehicles to the West and burning coal to create the electricity to make them.

And as we in the West are encouraged by the lunatics to condemn fossil fuels no one is allowed to mention that 84% of global energy comes from fossil fuels. (That is just 2% less than in 1973, by the way.) Without oil and gas, we would have to survive on 16% of the energy we use now. Oh, and you can’t make fertiliser or fly planes with solar power or ugly, bird-crunching windmills.

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Covid Vaccine Injuries Go Mainstream in Australia

Propaganda narratives shift slowly over time to absorb aspects of undeniable reality, whilst minimising damage to the interests of those benefiting from the big lie.

First, the Covid vaccines were safe and effective, and we were set to experience a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Get vaccinated to protect your community!

Next, the shots were safe and effective, but with rare side-effects, mostly mild. Still, the benefits outweighed the risks. Get vaccinated to protect your healthcare system!

In the latest narrative update, experts say all the shots except AstraZeneca’s are safe and effective, and they admit that vaccine injuries can be life-ruining, though still very rare. But Covid is worse. Get vaccinated to protect against Long Covid!

In an ‘After Covid’ Spotlight special on commercial media channel 7NEWS over the weekend, a panel of experts reflected on Australia’s Covid response. Tellingly, vaccine safety (or rather, lack thereof) occupied 17 out of a total 53 minutes, more than a quarter of the airtime.

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Americans Are Already Sticking It To The Permanent Bureaucracy Just Days After Landmark Supreme Court Ruling

Just days after the Supreme Court struck down the precedent of automatically deferring to bureaucrats, it is now ordering lower courts to reconsider some cases where federal agencies have interfered with the activities of Americans.

On June 28, the Supreme Court overturned Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, a case that set a precedent requiring courts to defer to reasonable agency interpretations of a given law when the language used in the law was ambiguous. Now, the Supreme Court has ordered lower courts to review Foster v. U.S. Department of Agriculture and KC Transport v. Secretary of Labor, two cases where judges limited the commercial activities of Americans due to the precedent of deference set under Chevron.

“Our clients may now make their case in court without judges putting their thumb on the scale in favor of the government,” said Paige Gilliard, an attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, the right-of-center legal nonprofit representing the plaintiffs in both cases. “The Supreme Court’s decision to end Chevron deference is a move to restore fairness in federal courts. Our clients Arlen Foster and KC Transport are among the first beneficiaries.”

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The Government Wants To Track Your Steak

The government has a long history of using tracking technology to ascertain our whereabouts, our habits, and even our preferences. From cellphones and cars to snow plows and garbage trucks, governments seemingly want to track anything that moves—or moos.

The USDA recently finalized a rule—set to go into effect in a few months—that will require all cattle and bison being moved across state lines to be tagged with radio-frequency identification (RFID) ear tags. RFID technology uses radio frequency waves to transmit and collect data by way of a system of electronic tags and scanners. The technology is best viewed as a type of electronic or remote barcode, in which scanners can read an RFID chip anywhere from a few meters away to around 100 meters away. In some ways analogous to a shorter-range GPS system, RFID can track geographic location and also operate as a system of data collection and storage.

In the context of livestock, a quick scan of an RFID tag can pull up information like a cow’s date of birth, weight, vaccine records, ownership history, what farms it has been to, and what movements it has made. The USDA is justifying its RFID mandate on public health grounds, claiming that it can help trace and eradicate potential disease outbreaks among livestock, such as mad cow disease or hoof-and-mouth disease. 

While plausible at first blush, it is far from clear that the mandate will accomplish its intended objective, and it is very clear that it will disproportionately hurt small and independent ranchers and cattle farmers.

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Sotomayor Is Right: The Supreme Court Should Reevaluate Absolute Immunity for Prosecutors

Consider the following hypothetical: You are jailed for two years as you await trial for murder. You are facing the death penalty. You have cancer, which relapsed during your incarceration without access to adequate treatment. And it turns out you were charged based on a false witness confession, which the local prosecutor allegedly destroyed evidence to obscure.

Now imagine suing that prosecutor and being told you have no recourse, because such government employees are entitled to absolute immunity.

This is the backdrop for Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s opinion Tuesday arguing that the Supreme Court may need to reevaluate the confines of that legal doctrine—absolute prosecutorial immunity—which prevents victims of alleged prosecutorial misconduct from getting recourse in the vast majority of circumstances.

The case at issue centers around Nickie Miller, a Kentucky man whom a woman named Natasha Martin implicated in a bizarre murder plot after the government offered her a deal to avoid prison time. The primary issue: She almost immediately sought to recant that confession. Law enforcement wouldn’t accept that. So she testified before a grand jury, and then tried to recant again, writing in jailhouse letters to another man she implicated that her statement came in response to “coercive interrogation techniques, threats, and undisclosed promises of consideration.”

When Miller’s defense team heard about those letters, it tried to obtain them. Martin reportedly asked Assistant Commonwealth Attorney Keith Craycraft how she should comply with the order, to which he allegedly responded that she should destroy the correspondence. She obliged.

The state eventually dropped the charges against Miller. The two years in jail, however, took a toll, according to his criminal defense attorney, who said that his cancer was in remission but recurred after the state locked him up, as he could not access his medication.

After his release, he sued Craycraft; the district court concluded he was entitled to absolute immunity. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit subsequently noted that Craycraft’s alleged misconduct was “difficult to justify and seemingly unbecoming of an official entrusted with enforcing the criminal law.” And then that court, too, confirmed the grant of absolute immunity, a testament to the sort of behavior the doctrine greenlights with its sweeping inoculation.

Miller has since died, and his estate is continuing the litigation on his behalf.

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A Law Professor’s Beef With a First Amendment ‘Spinning Out of Control’: Too Much Speech of the Wrong Sort

“The First Amendment is spinning out of control,” Columbia law professor Tim Wu warns in a New York Times essay. While Wu ostensibly objects to Supreme Court decisions that he thinks have interpreted freedom of speech too broadly, his complaint amounts to a rejection of the premise that the principle should be applied consistently, especially when it benefits speakers and messages he does not like.

The immediate provocation for Wu’s diatribe is yesterday’s Supreme Court decisions in two cases challenging Florida and Texas laws that aimed to restrict content moderation on social media. Although the justices remanded both cases for further consideration by the lower courts, Justice Elena Kagan’s majority opinion in Moody v. NetChoice made it clear that the “editorial discretion” protected by the First Amendment extends to the choices that social media platforms make in deciding which content to host and how to present it, even when those decisions are inconsistent, biased, or arguably unfair. And that discretion, she said, includes the use of algorithms that reflect such value judgments.

Although Wu has reservations about “the wisdom and questionable constitutionality of the Florida and Texas laws,” he thinks “the breadth of the court’s reasoning should serve as a wake-up call.” He faults the justices for “blithely assuming” that “algorithmic decisions are equivalent to the expressive decisions made by human editors at newspapers.” The ruling, Wu says, reflects a broader trend in which “liberal as well as conservative judges and justices have extended the First Amendment to protect nearly anything that can be called ‘speech,’ regardless of its value or whether the speaker is a human or a corporation.”

As Wu sees it, freedom of speech should hinge on the “value” of the ideas that people express. It is hard to imagine a broader license for government censorship.

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Watchdog sues for ATF records about shooting death of Arkansas Airport Official

The watchdog group Judicial Watch has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Justice (DOJ) seeking Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) records regarding the fatal shooting of Little Rock, Arkansas, resident and Executive Director of the Clinton National Airport: Bryan Malinowski.  

Malinowski was shot and wounded by ATF agents in shootout an ATF raid on his home in March. He died of his injuries. When originally asked for pertinent records, ATF produced only heavily redacted search warrant court filings. 

The lawsuit was filed June 10, 2024, after the ATF failed to respond adequately to an April 16 FOIA request for: 

  1. All emails and text messages sent to and from ATF officials regarding Little Rock resident Bryan Malinowski who died in an ATF raid on March 19, 2024.
  2. All records related to the raid on the home of Bryan Malinowski, including but not limited to, re-operational briefing documents, raid plans, investigative reports, memoranda, warrants and audio and video recordings.

On April 22, 2024, Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to ATF Director Steven Dettelbach, asking for details about “the deadly pre-dawn raid conducted by ATF in Little Rock, Arkansas, while executing a search warrant on the home of Bryan Malinowski, a local airport executive.”

An affidavit, which was unsealed after Malinowski’s death and produced to Judicial Watch, alleged he unlawfully sold guns without a license.

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U.S. Supreme Court Sends Marijuana And Gun Case Back To Lower Court, Emboldening DOJ’s Defense Of Firearm Ban

The U.S. Supreme Court has sent a case concerning gun rights for marijuana consumers back down to a lower court after issuing a potentially relevant ruling in a separate Second Amendment case, and the Justice Department is now reiterating its position that cannabis use warrants a ban on firearm ownership.

The high court has remanded several gun cases to their respective lower courts in light of the ruling in United States v. Rahimi, which affirmed the government’s right to restrict gun rights for a man with restraining orders for domestic violence. The cases heading back to lower levels include at least one related to the cannabis ban, and DOJ is now arguing that the SCOTUS decision “undermines” a federal court’s ruling that deemed the prohibition for marijuana consumers to be unconstitutional last year.

In a supplemental letter brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, where the United States vs. Daniels case was remanded by SCOTUS, the Justice Department said history “supports the government’s authority to disarm categories of persons whose firearm possession would endanger themselves or others.”

“Consistent with that principle, Congress may temporarily disarm unlawful users of controlled substances during periods of active drug use, when they present a special danger of firearm misuse,” it said. “The Supreme Court’s decision in Rahimi also is in tension with this Court’s opinion in United States v. Daniels, which made some of the very methodological errors that Rahimi corrected to find Section 922(g)(3) unconstitutional as applied to a marijuana user. The district court’s judgment should be reversed.”

DOJ has argued in multiple federal cases over the couple year that the statute banning cannabis consumers from owning or possessing guns is constitutional because it’s consistent with the nation’s history of disarming “dangerous” individuals.

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15 Secretaries Blow Off Congressional Subpoenas While Subpoena Refusal Lands Trump Adviser In Jail

The New York Times headline seemed to gloat: “Stephen Bannon Reports to Prison After One Final Podcast Episode.” 

“The show will be his last for four months, but the longtime adviser to Donald J. Trump has no intention of surrendering his influence,” the newspaper of record for the Democratic Party and the American left declared in its online subhead on Monday. 

And so the corporate media stories went, reporting on Bannon’s failed attempt to secure an 11th-hour reprieve from the U.S. Supreme Court. Bannon surrendered to federal authorities at a Connecticut federal prison to begin serving his time on contempt charges for defying a congressional subpoena. 

Loathed by the left and ruling-class Republicans, the conservative firebrand became the latest casualty of a two-tiered system of justice in America. 

As Bannon begins his term, 15 cabinet officials in the Biden administration continue to defy congressional subpoenas, and Merrick Garland, the attorney general of the United States, continues to insist he’s above Congress. 

On June 13, U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, chairman of the Committee on House Administration, issued subpoenas to 15 administration cabinet members seeking documents related to Biden’s constitutionally suspect executive order commanding federal agencies to assist in voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns. The agency chiefs failed to comply by Steil’s deadline of June 26.

“Not a single agency has responded with their strategic plan or with any details about the implementation of the EO,” the Wisconsin Republican said in a statement to The Federalist. “Additionally, we know that as many as 40 outside groups assisted and advised the agencies on implementation – we have received nothing on the role these groups played in the design of the strategic plans.” 

Seems like contempt of Congress. Will the cabinet secretaries be bunking with Bannon anytime soon? Don’t count on it. 

What about Garland? 

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