Tag: police state

Amish Farmer Faces Fines, Prison Time for Refusing to Comply with USDA Regulations

For nearly 30 years, Amos Miller has owned and operated Miller’s Organic Farm, an all-natural Amish farm located in Bird-in-Hand Pennsylvania. Like many Amish farmers, Miller likes to do things the old-fashioned way. He doesn’t use electricity, fertilizer, or gasoline, and he also stays away from modern preservatives.

The farm’s reputation has grown over the years, and it now boasts a private buyers club of approximately 4,000 members. Miller has sold all sorts of food to his buyers, such as organic eggs, raw milk, grass-fed beef and cheese, and fresh produce.

“They use it as a medicine,” Miller said in a 2021 interview. “It’s very healing to the body because it’s raw.”

“They’re good people,” said one of his customers. “Their place is very clean, and their produce is excellent.”

In recent years, however, the farm has found itself in the crosshairs of the US Department of Agriculture because of its failure to comply with federal farming regulations.

It all started in 2016, when two listeriosis illnesses that occured in 2014 were traced back to raw milk sold by Miller’s Organic Farm. Both infected people had to be hospitalized, and one tragically died from the illness.

The USDA has been trying to bring the farm into compliance with federal regulations ever since, but it’s been a long hard series of court battles, in part because Miller has been, by his own admission, less than fully co-operative with the government. Miller is facing fines and jail time for his actions.

The story reached a climax in March of this year when a federal judge ordered Miller to cease and desist all meat sales and authorized armed US marshals to use “reasonable force” to gain access to Miller’s farm so a court expert could inspect it. The expert—accompanied by the armed marshals—took an inventory of all Miller’s meat, and federal inspectors are now returning every few months to make sure he hasn’t sold any of it.

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Scotland Plans Live Facial Recognition Technology

More controversy is developing in the UK, this time in Scotland, around the use by law enforcement of cameras equipped with live facial recognition technology.

Reports say that the police in Scotland may intend to start using this tech to catch shoplifters and persons who break bail conditions. But civil rights group Big Brother Watch is warning against any kind of deployment of live facial recognition as incompatible with democracy – primarily because it indiscriminately jeopardizes the privacy of millions of people.

To make sure this is not happening, the non-profit’s head of research Jake Hurfurt has told the press that the tech should be banned.

That would be an improvement also from the point of view of legal clarity around how AI and big data are used by law enforcement; since currently, Hurfurt remarked, the government and the police “cobble together patchwork legal justifications to experiment on the public with intrusive and Orwellian technology.”

Big Brother Watch offered another observation – the UK is a rare country outside of China and Russia (apparently, even the EU is “scaling back”) that is ramping up this type of surveillance.

The previous heated debate over live face recognition had to do with the London police, and at the moment, the Met’s decision to deploy it – besides being “a multi-million pound mistake,” is also facing a legal challenge, the group said.

They are hopeful this might serve as a teachable moment for the police in Scotland and dissuade them from repeating the same costly “experiment” of trying to usher in a “hi-tech police state.”

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Welsh Police Pay Home Visit to Man For Displaying Reform UK Political Sign

A video shows Welsh police visiting a man’s home because he displayed a Reform UK political sign on the wall, despite this being a completely normal sight during election season.

Voice of Wales posted a clip to X showing an officer at the man’s house talking about how “concerns” had been expressed about the sign and that he needed to take a photo of it.

The officer also took a photo of another Lest We Forget Flag that is sometimes displayed outside homes to honor Britain’s war dead.

Apparently, such signs are apparently offensive and worthy of police investigation based on a single complaint, despite the fact that people in the UK routinely display signs of parties they support outside their homes during election season.

Such “concerns” were deemed a potential threat despite the fact that, according to polls, around 15-20 per cent of the British population is set to vote for Reform UK in the national election on July 4th.

According to Voice of Wales, the complaint was made by the charity which who owns the house next door, which is set to be turned into accommodation for asylum seekers (economic migrants).

As part of its manifesto, Reform UK has pledged to drastically cut mass migration and stop the flow of small boats containing illegal immigrants entering Britain.

This is by no means the only example of Brits receiving home visits from police over their political views.

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Ukrainian Anti-War Activist Jailed on Dubious Charges

Zelenskyy’s Ukraine has had a long and egregious history of jailing political dissenters, particularly those opposed to the current “forever war”. From banning opposing political parties to censoring media critical of Zelenskyy’s leadership, it seems indisputable that Ukraine has increasingly resorted to despotic measures to control public opinion.

In a more recent attack on freedom of speech in Ukraine, Bogdan Syrotiuk, a Trotskyist and anti-war activist, was arrested on April 25, 2024. News of the arrest was made public via an article and online petition by the World Socialist Web Site, a website affiliated with the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International. Syrotiuk was imprisoned by the Security Service of Ukraine and accused of treason due to his writings for the World Socialist Web Site, which the Ukrainian government considers a spreader of pro-Russian propaganda. This is largely due to its criticism of NATO’s actions in the region which was a major reason why Russia undertook its invasion in the first place.

Nevertheless, criticism of any government does not automatically equate with support for that government’s geopolitical opponents. In fact, the International Committee of the Fourth International made it extremely clear in its “Two years of war: Statement on Ukraine” that it opposes the “logic” of Putin’s invasion and supports a withdrawal of Russian troops.

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California Lawmakers Kill World’s Most Marginal Psychedelics Reform

The world’s most modest psychedelics reform has failed in the California Legislature once again.

Yesterday, the sponsors of a bill that would have allowed three California counties to run temporary pilot programs through which veterans and first responders could be administered psilocybin (the “magic” chemical in magic mushrooms) under medical supervision pulled their legislation, reports KQED.

The bill’s authors cited a certain “no” vote in a coming Assembly Health Committee hearing as the reason for axing their own legislation.

This is the latest failure of legislation aimed at liberalizing laws surrounding psychedelic use in the Golden State.

Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed legislation that would have decriminalized the personal possession and use of various plant-based psychedelics, saying he might support narrower legalization of these substances for therapeutic uses.

In May, a broader measure that would have established a statewide system for licensing and regulating psychedelic use, including the use of MDMA, mescaline, and psilocybin, in private therapeutic settings stalled in the state Senate.

The bill that failed this week was narrower still. It would have authorized the public health officers of San Francisco, San Diego, and Santa Cruz to license up to five facilities where licensed medical professionals could administer psilocybin and psilocin (both psychoactive substances found in so-called magic mushrooms) to screened military veterans and first responders. The program would sunset after three years.

California’s latest, failed reform efforts were modeled off new programs set up by Oregon and Colorado that likewise legalize psychedelic use in tightly regulated, state-licensed therapy-like settings.

Some local jurisdictions, including several California cities and Washington, D.C., have passed more modest “deprioritization” policies to classify enforcement of certain psychedelic laws as the lowest law enforcement priority.

In D.C., at least, that’s created a thriving gray-black market for psychedelic mushrooms. With the modest assurance that they won’t face legal penalties, many of the city’s pre-existing, semi-legal cannabis businesses have started selling mushrooms as well.

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Police officers who attended Trump’s Jan. 6 ‘Stop the Steal’ rally may be allowed to keep their identities private

A striking legal question came before justices of the Washington State Supreme Court this week: Does a group of police officers who attended the “Stop the Steal” rally for Donald Trump at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, have a Constitutionally-protected right to keep the results of a probe into their specific conduct that day secret, or must their names — and those results — be revealed to the public?

The question unfolded during oral arguments in Jane & John Does 1-6 v. Seattle Police Department et al. on Tuesday.

At the center of the case are six police officers, two of whom were fired in August 2021 and have been identified publicly by the Seattle Police Department as married former officers Caitlin Everett and Alexander Everett. Four others have not been named publicly by the department though state prosecutors noted to the Washington State Supreme Court on Tuesday that their names have previously emerged on social media. This factor is central to the state’s case; as prosecutors pointed out this week, these four individuals have not only retained their roles at the Seattle Police Department but also have not suffered any harassment as an investigation got underway, The Associated Press reported. 

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SCOTUS Declines To Punish the Feds for Suppressing Social Media Speech

The Supreme Court will allow federal agencies to resume widespread communication with social media companies for the purposes of suppressing controversial speech. For everyone who was perturbed by the Twitter Files and Facebook Files—which revealed a vast web of government pressure on private actors, called jawboning—this is a regrettable outcome.

The case was Murthy v. Missouri—also known as Missouri v. Biden—and involved a group of individuals who were kicked off Facebook and Twitter. They contended that the platforms took such actions at the behest of the federal government. The Court held 6-3 that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring such a case and thus the lower court, the 5th Circuit, erred in prohibiting the government from engaging in said communications with social media companies.

Writing for the majority, Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett explained that the plaintiffs failed to offer up overwhelming evidence that government malfeasance was the cause of their woe.

“The primary weakness in the record of past restrictions is the lack of specific causation findings with respect to any discrete instance of content moderation,” she wrote. “And while the record reflects that the Government defendants played a role in at least some of the platforms’ moderation choices, the evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment. The Fifth Circuit, by attributing every platform decision at least in part to the defendants, glossed over complexities in the evidence.”

In his writeup for The Volokh Conspiracy, Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Adler notes other standing issues: The plaintiffs failed to show that a repeat injury was likely, for instance, which is a requirement for injunctive relief.

“The Court emphasizes that it is always more difficult to show standing when the alleged injury ‘results from the independent action of some third party not before the court,’ in this case the social media companies,” writes Adler.

Three of the justices—Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch—saw matters differently. In dissent, Alito expressed the view that the plaintiffs were being held to too high a standard, and that the evidence of government suppression was quite extensive.

“In sum, the officials wielded potent authority,” wrote Alito. “Their communications with Facebook were virtual demands. And Facebook’s quavering responses to those demands show that it felt a strong need to yield.”

Alito’s dissent includes a lengthy summary of the dubious actions taken by the federal government to induce social media companies to remove contrarian COVID-19 content; the justice concludes that White House communications staffers badgered Facebook into compliance.

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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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Exposed: How Climate Racketeers Aim to Force Us into Smart Gulags

Shocking evidence is emerging from Australia and New Zealand of how the climate scam is being used to impose a techno-totalitarian smart-city future.

The criminocratic global imperialists often use their Commonwealth colonies to try out the most insidious escalations of their tyranny – think of Canada, New Zealand and Australia during Covid.

We can therefore assume that this is going to be the blueprint for the roll-out of their Fourth Industrial Revolution agenda across the world.

The sinister scheme in question, called “Managed Retreat”, has been exposed by independent researcher Kate Mason on her excellent Substack blog aimed at “deconstructing 4IR narratives”.

The idea is that exaggerated “modelling” of the imagined effects of “climate change” is being used to define certain areas as unsuitable for human settlement.

Working hand in hand with the state is the insurance industry – long a central part of the corrupt criminocratic empire – which deems homes in these areas to be “uninsurable”.

Banks are also playing their part (of course!) saying they are unwilling to provide mortgages for these “uninsurable” properties.

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Supreme Court Turns Away COVID-19 Vaccine Appeals

U.S. Supreme Court justices on June 24 rejected appeals brought over COVID-19 vaccines by Children’s Health Defense (CHD), a nonprofit founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an independent candidate running for president.

The nation’s top court rejected an appeal seeking to overturn lower court rulings that found that CHD and its members lacked standing to sue the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over its emergency authorizations of COVID-19 vaccines for minors.

The justices also rebuffed another CHD appeal in a case that challenged the COVID-19 vaccine mandate imposed on students at Rutgers University, a public college in New Jersey.

The Supreme Court did not comment on either denial. It included them in a lengthy list dealing with dozens of cases.

“Disappointing that the courts are closed to FDA fraud harming millions of Americans,” Robert Barnes, an attorney representing CHD in the FDA case, told The Epoch Times in an email.

He called for Congress to pass reforms.

Julio Gomez, an attorney representing CHD in the Rutgers case, told The Epoch Times in an email that the Supreme Court’s denials marked a sad day because clarity is needed on vaccines and the Supreme Court’s 1905 decision in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which upheld a city’s law requiring vaccination against smallpox.

Mr. Gomez pointed to a recent federal appeals court ruling that determined that Jacobson did not apply to a case filed against a vaccine mandate in California because plaintiffs had produced evidence that the COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Lawyers for Rutgers and the government did not return requests for comment.

In the FDA case, CHD and parents in Texas and Florida argued that the regulatory agency cleared COVID-19 vaccines under emergency authorization despite COVID-19 posing less risk than influenza to children and without adequate clinical testing. The FDA also wrongly promoted the vaccines, the plaintiffs alleged.

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