Tag: police state

Air Conditioning Bans Are Latest Example Of Climate Alarmism Damaging Lives

Germany’s public broadcaster ARD has recently rolled out an “anti-AC campaign,” alarming citizens about the supposed “dangers” of air conditioning. This initiative seems particularly misguided as Europe grapples with a severe heat wave that has compelled governments to close schools, shut down iconic tourist sites, reduce business hours, and, most tragically, led to dozens of fatalities.

What’s happening in Europe is the grim outcome of two decades steeped in climate dogma: minor inconveniences have transformed into rigid policies and cultural norms that prioritize emission reductions over human survival.

For the past 20 years, we have been told that climate change poses the greatest existential threat to humanity. We have been urged to take immediate action, even if it means sacrificing comfort and convenience, to avert catastrophe. The initial proposed solutions included silly but manageable changes, such as banning plastic grocery bags and paper straws. However, the demands have escalated to campaigns  aimed at drastically reducing meat consumption, increasing calls to restrict gas stoves, and government mandates encouraging drivers to switch from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles.

Many of these measures have caused daily inconveniences. We’ve learned to sip drinks quickly before paper straws dissolve. Others have raised the cost of living: electric stoves are typically more expensive than gas ones, and EVs can lose significant range in extreme heat or cold — as seen in viral videos of “dead” vehicles stranded at Chicago charging stations during subzero winters. We also face higher electricity bills and rolling blackouts as utilities shutter coal and gas plants in favor of intermittent solar and wind. In one case, a utility company even remotely took control of smart thermostats for thousands of Colorado households during peak summer heat, leaving homeowners powerless to intervene.

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4Chan trolls UK government with another AI hamster as fines hit $800k

4Chan has continued to troll the UK government and Ofcom after they hit the website with fines of over $800,000, and they’re answering with more AI hamsters.

Over the last year, a number of governments have been cracking down on what online content can be accessed by children under the age of 18. That includes the United Kingdom, which is working on a social media ban similar to the one that Australia implemented. 

The UK has implemented age safety verification checks for certain material too and has hit a number of websites with takedowns, as well as fines. 4Chan has been caught up in the latter, being issued with fines that now total over $800,000.

While Ofcom, the UK regulator, is still seeking payment from 4Chan, their lawyer has once again responded with an AI hamster.

4Chan hits back at UK government’s latest fine

“Ofcom wrote. Again. Demanding that 4chan pay its fine. Sent us bank details and everything. Oh no. Super scary. We replied with a hamster. Again,” Preston Byrne, the website’s lawyer, posted on X. 

Byrne also showed off the email response he sent to the regulator. “You want money, huh? Come get it,” he started, with an AI hamster wearing a Thug Life hate being surronded by mountains of dollar bills.

“As 4Chan has no assets in the United Kingdom (given that it has no connection to the United Kingdom), that would require you to show up in a US court as a platiff, waive soreign immunity, and overcome existing U.S. doctrine regarding the non-enforcement of foreign regulatory penalties. 

“We suspect that isn’t going to happen. We suspect you know it isn’t going to happen, too.”

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Appeals Court Upholds New York ‘Gas Stove Ban’ That Chuck Schumer Insisted Wasn’t Even Happening

A federal appeals court just upheld a New York state ban on gas stoves, which is very strange, considering the fact that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York insisted that the ban on gas stoves wasn’t even happening.

This has all been unfolding quietly in the background for about two years now.

Groups which are part of the gas industry challenged the ban but a federal court just sided with the state.

Just the News reports:

Federal appeals court upholds New York’s ‘gas stove ban’ amid legal challenge

New York could be moving ahead with a first-in-the-nation ban on natural gas hookups in new buildings after a federal appeals court rejected a challenge from industry groups.

The ruling issued Tuesday by the U.S. Court of Appeals Second Circuit rejected a lawsuit by natural gas industry groups challenging a provision of New York’s All-Electric Buildings Act, which would ban gas hookups in new buildings under seven stories, among other restrictions.

A coalition of construction and trade groups sued to block the 2023 law, saying it conflicts with federal law under the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act and would drive up costs for businesses and energy consumers.

But the appeals court upheld lower court rulings that had determined federal law “does not preempt ” the state’s regulations on natural gas hook ups, and on Tuesday dismissed the industry lawsuit.

In 2023, when people started complaining about this, Chuck Schumer treated it like a conspiracy theory and condescendingly claimed no one is coming after gas stoves.

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The House Just Voted for KOSA, a Privacy and Free Speech Disaster

The House voted Monday night to build the machinery of online identity checks into federal law, packaging the mandate inside a bundle of kids online safety bills that cleared the chamber 267-117, with 47 members not voting.

It marks the first time any version of the Kids Online Safety Act, known as KOSA, has escaped the lower chamber, and the version that survived carries a structure that pushes platforms to figure out who you are before you can use them.

The legislation, called the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, or KIDS Act (H.R. 7757), stitches together more than a dozen separate bills, including KOSA, the SCREEN Act, the SAFE BOTs Act, COPPA 2.0, and the SPY Kids Act, plus data broker rules and research initiatives.

House leaders rushed it to the floor under suspension of the rules, a fast-track path requiring a two-thirds majority. Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie and ranking Democrat Frank Pallone, who announced their agreement a week earlier, said the bill would “hold Big Tech accountable” and described months of cross-aisle work toward what Guthrie called a “workable compromise.”

If you’ve been following our updates, you’ll know the accountability positioning hides the actual design. The bill defines “know” or “knows” to mean “to know or should have known,” and that phrase runs through sections covering platforms, AI chatbots, and gaming services.

A company that fails to spot a minor faces legal exposure, which gives every platform a reason to gather more information about everyone who shows up. The text tries to defuse this, stating that nothing in it may be construed “to require the provider of a covered platform to implement an age gating or age verification functionality on the covered platform.”

The reassurance collapses on contact. A platform forbidden from ignoring a user’s age, yet liable the moment it “should have known” someone was a minor, has one move left. It starts checking ages, deploying age-estimation tools, demanding ID, or watching behavior closely enough to guess. The law does not order surveillance outright, it engineers the incentive and lets companies build the rest.

That is the First Amendment problem dressed as a child-safety provision. Verifying age means verifying identity, and identity checks sit between a person and ordinary protected activity, whether that is reading, watching, posting, or speaking. Adult websites would face explicit age-verification requirements under the package, which functionally means every visitor proves who they are before viewing lawful content. Anonymous and pseudonymous speech, the kind the Supreme Court has shielded for decades, gets harder to find the more platforms lean on identity to limit their liability.

The bill tightens how data brokers handle children’s information and updates the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act to widen its reach.

But, to do that, it would require platforms that know a user is a minor to offer controls that limit communications, restrict geolocation sharing, cut compulsive-use features, and let users opt out of personalized recommendation systems, with default settings for minors set to what the bill calls “the most protective level of control with respect to privacy and safety.”

These are strong protections on paper and would be good if they applied evenly to all users, but they all depend on the platform identifying minors first, which loops straight back to the same question of how much data gets pulled from users, adult or not, to sort out who the children are.

The encryption language carries the same gap. The bill says platform requirements may not override encrypted communications and that companies must comply in ways that “do not compromise the integrity of strong encryption.” That could read as a shield until you notice that regulatory pressure to monitor behavior or flag certain users can hollow out encryption without ever formally banning it. Compliance routes around the protection the text claims to offer.

Getting the package across the floor cost the duty of care provision, the piece many child-safety groups and KOSA’s Senate authors consider the heart of the bill. The text now states that nothing in it may be construed to “impose a duty of care on a provider of a covered platform.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a KOSA co-author, wrote that “KOSA without a duty of care isn’t KOSA,” and said last week that the House version is “dead in the Senate.” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), the other co-author, agrees the provision was central. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, told reporters he stays open to negotiating with the House.

That stalemate is the most encouraging thing about this whole fight.

The Senate’s standalone KOSA (S.1748) keeps the duty of care, which would legally require platforms to “exercise reasonable care” to prevent broad categories of harm to minors. On the free speech axis, that is the more dangerous of the two bills, not the safer one. A duty of care over vaguely defined harms compels companies to police or re-engineer recommendation algorithms for lawful, constitutionally protected content, under threat of liability so open-ended that the rational corporate response is to over-remove anything that might draw a lawsuit.

So neither chamber holds the civil-liberties high ground. The Senate bill compels platforms to suppress protected speech, while the House bill conscripts them into identity verification, and a conference committee tasked with reconciling the two could just as easily graft the worst of each onto a single law as split the difference.

The good news for anyone who values either anonymity or free expression is that the two chambers, each representing a different type of civil liberties disaster, do not appear close to agreement.

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Europe’s Highest Court Rules Against Military Member in COVID Vaccine Mandate Case

A military officer failed to convince Europe’s highest court that Italy’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for military members discriminated against military members because the mandate didn’t also apply to civilian employees.

The officer, identified by the initials B.G., served in Italy’s Army Engineer Corps. He was suspended without pay in January 2022 for refusing to comply with the mandate.

Earlier this month, the European Court of Justice ruled that opposition to vaccine mandates based on policy disagreement, rather than sincerely held belief, is not protected under European Union (EU) anti-discrimination law.

B.G. challenged his suspension, arguing that regular COVID-19 tests were an acceptable alternative to compulsory vaccination and that workers in other sectors were given this choice.

Italy’s Constitutional Court ruled against him, finding that the military vaccine mandate was an appropriate measure for military personnel.

On appeal, Italy’s Council of State, the country’s highest administrative appeals court, asked the European Court of Justice to clarify several legal questions.

The European Court of Justice found that B.G. did not demonstrate a sincerely held religious, spiritual or philosophical belief protected under EU law.

“Judges found BG was not expressing a protected religious, philosophical or spiritual belief but challenging Italy’s public health policy,” Courthouse News reported. His objections “focused on vaccine effectiveness, possible side effects, testing as an alternative and the way the mandate was implemented.”

In its ruling, the European Court of Justice wrote that B.G. “does not seek to oppose the compulsory vaccination at issue in the main proceedings on the basis of his own beliefs, but to challenge, as such, the choices made by the Italian authorities in the field of public health.”

Those objections “constitute opinions” on public health, and as such, are not protected. Aside from sincerely held beliefs, EU law also protects against discrimination based on age, disability or sexual orientation.

Dutch attorney Meike Terhorst called the ruling “unfortunate and disappointing,” as the legal protection of personal beliefs in the EU “appears to be an empty shell.”

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Supreme Court Grants Cert In Grant v. Higgins: A Major Challenge To Connecticut’s Assault Weapon Ban

In a significant development for gun rights advocates, the U.S. Supreme Court on June 30, 2026, granted certiorari in Grant v. Higgins, a challenge to Connecticut’s post-Sandy Hook assault weapon ban. The Court consolidated the case with the parallel Illinois case Viramontes v. Cook County.

The justices will now directly address whether the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect the right of law-abiding Americans to possess AR-15 platform rifles and other commonly owned semiautomatic firearms.

This is the breakthrough Second Amendment advocates have long awaited. Connecticut’s “assault weapons” ban — and similar laws nationwide — represent a direct challenge to the core right to keep and bear arms “in common use” for lawful purposes.

Grant v. Higgins (originally filed as Grant v. Rovella/Lamont) is brought by the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), the Connecticut Citizens Defense League (CCDL), and individual plaintiffs including Eddie Grant Jr. It challenges Connecticut’s ban on semiautomatic rifles, which prohibits firearms by specific name and by a list of arbitrary “features” such as pistol grips, folding stocks, and flash suppressors.

The lower courts, including the Second Circuit, upheld the ban. Petitioners argue this ruling defies Supreme Court precedent by treating the most popular rifle in America — the AR-15 platform — as somehow outside constitutional protection. The question presented is clear: Whether the Second and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee the right to possess semiautomatic rifles that are in common use for lawful purposes, including the AR-15.

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Empire At 250: Can The Principles Of 1776 Survive The American Police State?

“The people are the only legitimate fountain of power.”

– James Madison

This is a year of strange anniversaries.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a band of revolutionaries declared their independence from a king.

America’s founders rejected concentrated power. They denounced standing armies. They distrusted government secrecy. They risked their lives to escape a ruler who could tax without consent, wage war without accountability, and govern without meaningful restraint.

Twenty-five years ago, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, America embarked on a very different journey.

The federal government claimed extraordinary emergency powers. Surveillance expanded. Wars multiplied. Executive authority grew. Constitutional safeguards were weakened in the name of security.

One anniversary marked a revolt against empire. The other marked the normalization of it.

Now, as America prepares to celebrate 250 years of independence, we are confronted with a bitter irony: the republic born in rebellion against empire has become an empire in everything but name.

Worse, the U.S. government is violating the very principles that justified the American Revolution.

Graft, grift and corruption. Endless wars. Profiteering. Trillions squandered abroad while the nation sinks deeper into debt at home.

A government that governs increasingly by executive order and emergency decree. A government that wastes taxpayer money with impunity, rewards political loyalty over constitutional fidelity, installs loyalists in positions meant to serve the public, dismantles safeguards against corruption, shields insiders from scrutiny, and treats accountability as an inconvenience.

National states of emergency that never seem to end. Efforts to nullify constitutional guarantees such as birthright citizenship. Expanded death penalty powers. A growing willingness to bypass Congress, sidestep constitutional restraints and rule by fiat.

Surveillance programs that track where we go, what we buy, who we know, what we say and what we believe. Fusion centers, facial recognition, license plate readers, AI-assisted monitoring, financial tracking, intelligence-sharing agreements and a sprawling security apparatus that treats privacy as a loophole and dissent as a threat.

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New Map Tool Helps Drivers Dodge Atlanta-Based Flock Safety License Plate Cameras And Bluetooth Trackers

A free open-source website called DeFlock now lets drivers route around automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras as a surveillance company prepares to add Bluetooth device-tracking to the same roadside hardware.

DeFlock, built by developer Will Freeman and backed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), crowdsources ALPR camera locations nationwide and maps roughly half of Flock Safety’s roughly 100,000-camera network.

Users enter a start and destination, select an avoidance buffer between 50 and 500 feet, and receive a privacy-optimized route.

A companion tool called “Have I Been Flocked,” available through StopFlock, lets users check whether their plate has appeared in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)-obtained Flock query logs.

Flock Safety sent DeFlock a cease-and-desist order over alleged trademark dilution. Freeman declined to comply, with the EFF providing legal backing.

DeFlock’s growth coincides with plans by ELSAG, a subsidiary of Italian defense company Leonardo, to add device-tracking sensors to existing ALPR hardware.

The system, called SignalTrace, scans passing vehicles for Bluetooth and wireless signals from phones, smartwatches, earbuds, and fitness trackers, then correlates devices that travel together to a specific plate and timestamp. ELSAG describes the method as “non-intrusive intelligence gathering.” 404 Media reported the SignalTrace system on June 8, 2026.

An EFF analysis published in May 2026 found agencies had used Flock data for school residency checks, background searches, and noise complaints. More than 50 agencies ran hundreds of protest-related Flock searches over a 10-month period.

Washington State’s Driver Privacy Act, signed by Gov. Bob Ferguson on March 30, 2026, bans ALPR collection near health-care facilities, schools, and places of worship, and sets a 21-day default data retention limit. NPR reported in February 2026 that several cities terminated Flock contracts over concerns about federal immigration agencies accessing locally collected plate data.

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Residents of Massachusetts Coastal Community Left Stunned After Receiving Letter Explaining Why They Should Not Fly American Flags on THEIR OWN PROPERTY

Residents of a small Massachusetts island community are shocked and furious upon learning from town officials that they may not be able to fly American flags to celebrate the nation’s upcoming 250th birthday.

As Fox News reported on Saturday, homeowners on Plum Island received a letter from the town of Newbury warning them last week that it had become aware of multiple “devices and materials intended to deter” protected shorebirds from frequenting beach and dune systems.

These materials included “mylar streamers, flags, and reflective materials.”

The letter goes on to mention that homeowners could face significant financial penalties for failing to comply with the state and federal Endangered Species Acts, which Newbury town officials have vowed to enforce.

“Activities intended to deter protected shorebirds from utilizing suitable habitat may be viewed as harassment or disruption of normal feeding, nesting, or migratory behavior,” which is prohibited under the state and federal Endangered Species Acts, and “carry significant regulatory and financial penalties,” the letter reads.

“Non-compliance may result in state or federal enforcement actions and, thus, the Town urges residents to comply with applicable state and federal wildlife protection laws.”

When Fox News went to speak with the residents, they were stunned to see flags included in the letter.

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California’s $20 Million Attempt To Silence Medical Speech

In a trial set to begin June 24, California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta is asking a court to do something that should alarm every American, regardless of where they stand on abortion: punish nonprofit organizations with ruinous fines for speaking about a lawful medical treatment.

The target is not fraud. These charities offer their services for free.

It is not patient harm. There is no evidence of any patient being harmed.

It is not even illegal conduct. The underlying treatment remains perfectly legal.

The target is speech.

Heartbeat International and Real Options are pro-life nonprofits that provide information and care to women who first take the abortion drug but regret that choice and want to continue their pregnancies. California wants to impose penalties approaching $20 million because these charities have dared to tell women that another option may exist.

Twenty million dollars. That number alone should tell us what this case is really about.

No reasonable observer can believe that bankrupting charities is a proportionate response to truthful and non-misleading statements about a free service designed to help a woman exercise her constitutional right to continue her pregnancy. This is not consumer protection. It is political warfare conducted through the machinery of a government that wishes to silence speech it does not like.

What’s most remarkable is what California cannot prove.

After years of investigation, subpoenas, discovery, and litigation, the attorney general has failed to identify a single woman harmed by APR treatment. Not one. No parade of victims. No evidence of widespread deception. He set up a website practically begging for complaints and still could not muster a single woman claiming she was misled or harmed.

Instead, seven women have publicly shared the stories of how Heartbeat International and Real Options helped them successfully reverse their abortions. Three mothers are slated to testify from the stand about their joy at reversing their unwanted abortions.

Still, the state asks the court to punish the very charities who helped these women continue their wanted pregnancies simply because government lawyers disagree with their viewpoint on the scientific evidence regarding APR.

That is a dangerous precedent.

Scientific disagreement is not fraud. If it were, much of modern medicine would not exist. Medical consensus is not handed down from on high. It evolves. Researchers debate. Physicians challenge prevailing views. Studies are published, criticized, replicated, and revised.

The proper response to disputed science is more debate, more research, and more evidence – not government censorship backed by eight-figure penalties.

Yet that is precisely what California seeks.

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