Tag: police state

A total eclipse of the smart

We had our small respite from things as they are, languishing as we all mostly were here in the gloom of the moon as it traversed the sun. For a small few minutes we were insignificant, mere pinpricks of importance on the face of a planet in this immeasurable cosmos.

Our small worlds rendered foolish in the vastness.

We can be, if nothing else, grateful to science for understanding and predicting the eclipse and perhaps religion and folklore for its explanations because it must have been quite a ruckus for primitive tribes once upon a time. The not understanding drives us humans to understanding and explanation. Some of us. We don’t want the unpredictable.

We want to know why something is the way it is. It is in our nature. It is why, now presumably understanding the movement of celestial things, we can rest watching an eclipse with the quietened birds and the colours drifting to dark, saturated. Watching as it gradually returns to normal and not be afraid.

As if normal existed now.

It is a distance too far to bridge almost now… the path to normal. We are watching a changing world. To see it from both sides right now is an experience. The far left is convinced that the far right are totalitarianisms and the far right is utterly convinced that the far left are. It boggles the mind some days. How can both be true? But they can be. It is perhaps in this that we can find the long sought end to divisiveness among us all: Totalitarianism is totalitarianism. Both sides can agree. It is what it is, no matter what it is labelled.

Totalitarianism shifts its shadow over the light of all we humans have fought for throughout history: the right to freedom of a society and the individual and peace and the pursuit, albeit difficult sometimes, of happiness. But then there are those who live in a mechanized world where there is a black and white answer to everything and all things need to be controlled so that a prescribed outcome will happen.

Predictability is all they want and they can only achieve it through a kind of worship of power and a kind of blind obedience to a vision of a utopian future. For these groups, there are no greys nor discussion nor other options.

So many of the things the new ideologues want could never be achieved in a free democratic world and so that has to change. They can do it from the left or they can do it from the right but it is almost inevitable the way things are going. And when these things happen, people change. People change. Sometimes, most times, not for the better. The shadows drift at the edge of lives down through the generations. The broken hope. The famished trust. The bewildered pain. The misplaced anger. The children of the world’s history of atrocities will never feel safety again.

How many generations it will take to replace the fear is anybody’s guess. We still see 2,000 year old fear as if it were yesterday in the world today. It rages on the streets and fuels wars and shatters hope. We have not lived long enough perhaps. I do not know.

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House Votes To Extend Warrantless Spying Powers

US lawmakers have passed a bill reauthorizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a law which allows the government to surveil American citizens without a warrant. A small group of Republicans previously blocked the vote, but allowed it to proceed following a minor amendment to the law.

The two-year extension passed the House on Friday in a bipartisan vote of 273-147, with 126 Republicans and 147 Democrats supporting the bill, which will now proceed to the Senate. Though lawmakers also debated an amendment that would have forced federal agencies to obtain warrants before spying on Americans, it failed in a tie vote.

“This is how the Constitution dies… This is a sad day for America,” Republican Rep. Thomas Massie said after the amendment went “down in flames.” He noted that House Speaker Mike Johnson provided the tie-breaking vote to kill the warrant requirement.

Though Johnson was once a vocal critic of FISA’s Section 702 – which handed US intelligence agencies sweeping powers to spy on Americans in the wake of the 9/11 attacks – he quickly reversed course after his promotion to House speaker.

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Texas puts Delta-8 THC products in state lawmakers’ crosshairs

The salad days of gas station weed in Texas may be coming to an end.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick is including a ban on Delta-8 and Delta-9 products in his list of goals for the 2025 Texas legislative session, putting the future of the popular and controversial hemp products in jeopardy.

In his 2024 Interim Legislative Charges prospectus, Patrick outlined his desire for lawmakers to “examine the sale of intoxicating hemp products in Texas.” The document also calls for legislators to “make recommendations to further regulate the sale of these products, and suggest legislation to stop retailers who market these products to children.”

Both Delta-8 and Delta-9 are THC molecules capable of producing an intoxicating effect, but Delta-8 occurs naturally in marijuana in much smaller quantities. Delta-8 first hit Texas shelves after a loophole in the 2018 Farm Bill legalized hemp but did not specify what form of THC would be regulated. Since then, Delta-9 products have also emerged in low-THC edible forms.

Six years later and two years after Texas began allowing hemp plants in Texan soil, over 7,000 businesses in Texas operate retail hemp licenses, and hundreds more possess the license to manufacture and market their own hemp products. Meanwhile, traditional marijuana is still only legal medically, and its use is heavily regulated. The so-called grey markets have drawn ire from lawmakers concerned that the products, which are not regulated by the FDA, are too easily accessible to minors.

The Texas Department of State Health Services first moved to ban Delta-8 in 2021, but an injunction has halted the prohibition, leaving Delta-8 on the market for now.The Lieutenant Governor’s language in legislative charges does not appear to leave room for a possible middle ground between an unregulated cannabinoid free-for-all and outright ban. 

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Speaker Mike Johnson Claims Classified Briefing Made Him Flip-Flop on Spy Powers Reform

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) on Wednesday explained his apparent flip-flop on a controversial surveillance law, saying that he now favors limited reforms after receiving a classified briefing.

Speaker Johnson was asked by reporters why he changed his opinion on reforming Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a controversial surveillance law that is meant to target foreign adversaries, but often surveils Americans’ communications without a warrant.

Johnson this week came out against a warrant requirement for Section 702 and moved not to allow an amendment that would have barred intelligence and law enforcement agencies from purchasing Americans’ private information through third-party data brokers. This is considered a run around the Fourth Amendment protection against warrantless searches.

This amounts to a dramatic reversal, since Johnson supported legislation to close the data broker loophole in July 2023, and the Louisiana congressman supported the USA RIGHTS act, which FreedomWorks described as one of the “strongest possible reforms” of FISA.

Johnson said his reversal came after receiving classified briefings on Section 702. He explained:

When I was a member of Judiciary I saw the abuses of the FBI, the terrible abuses over and over and over… and then when I became Speaker I went to the SCIF and got the confidential briefing on sort of the other perspective on that to understand the necessity of section 702 of FISA and how important it is for national security. And it gave me a different perspective.

“That’s part of the process, you have to be fully informed,” he added.

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Georgia Cops Are Still Hassling Vape Stores Over Legal Products

In 2022, Reason reported that local police departments in Georgia were hassling vape and smoke shops for the legal products they sold. Two years later, those products remain every bit as legal as before, but cops are still making life difficult for vendors.

On March 13, officers with the Newnan Police Department Drug and Vice Unit raided Newnan Tobacco & Vapor. According to The Newnan Times-Herald, officers said the raid came after “compliance checks with local stores that sell Delta 8, 9 or THC products.”

Delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, which creates the “high” from using marijuana. Ever since the 2018 Farm Bill removed hemp from the list of controlled substances, federal law limits the amount of delta-9 in any substance to 0.3 percent.

But around the same time the Farm Bill became law, scientists discovered delta-8 THC, which produces a similar “high” as delta-9 but can be synthesized out of CBD derived from hemp. (A similar process produces a similar compound, delta-10 THC.) Since the Farm Bill specifically legalized the sale and production of hemp, it was assumed that any hemp byproducts were legitimate, as well—and in 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit agreed.

Georgia passed a similar law in 2019, which legalized hemp in the state, as well as “all derivatives, extracts, cannabinoids, isomers, acids, salts, and salts of isomers, whether growing or not, with the federally defined THC level for hemp or a lower level.”

And yet police departments hassle smoke shops over their perfectly legal products.

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States Keep Passing Unconstitutional Age-Verification Laws for Porn Sites

Last Friday, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear signed a controversial bill requiring age verification for individuals seeking to use pornography websites in the state. While the bill seeks to prevent minors from accessing explicit materials, the law will require a substantial invasion of adults’ privacy.

The newly signed law started as an unrelated bill aimed at tightening penalties for child sexual abuse and other crimes, with the age-verification provision of the bill added as a floor amendment in March.

“Pornography is creating a public health crisis and having a corroding influence on minors,” the final bill reads. “Pornography may also impact brain development and functioning, contribute to emotional and medical illnesses, shape deviate sexual arousal, and lead to difficulty in forming or maintaining positive, intimate relationships, as well as harmful sexual behaviors and addiction.”

The bill requires pornography websites to limit access to adults and to verify a user’s age by accessing their government-issued identification or using another “commercially reasonable method of identification that relies on public or private transactional data.” Under the law, sites that violate the law face $10,000 fines for each instance that a minor accesses pornography.

As a result of this law, it’s likely that major porn websites will cease operations in Kentucky rather than develop a complex and invasive age-verification system. PornHub has so far left seven states that have adopted similar laws. 

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A Florida Judge Says $165,000 in Fines for 3 Minor Code Violations Is Not ‘Excessive’

A Florida judge yesterday ruled against a Lantana homeowner who faces more than $165,000 in fines for three minor code violations that harmed no one. Sandy Martinez, who is represented by the Institute for Justice (I.J.), argued that the financially crippling demand, which stems from driveway cracks, a storm-damaged fence, and cars that were parked partially on her own lawn, violates the Florida Constitution’s ban on excessive fines and its guarantee of due process. But Palm Beach County Circuit Court Judge Luis Delgado granted the city’s motion for summary judgment, concluding that the fines were not “grossly disproportionate.”

Martinez hopes to persuade Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal that Delgado is wrong about that. “Six-figure fines for parking on your own property are outrageous,” says I.J. attorney Mike Greenberg. “The Florida Constitution’s Excessive Fines Clause was designed to stop precisely this sort of abuse—to prevent people from being fined into poverty for trivial violations. The court’s opinion renders those bedrock protections a dead letter. We will appeal.”

Martinez’s debt to the city began accumulating in 2013, when she was cited for cracks in her driveway. For a single mother with a modest income who was living from one paycheck to another, the cost of laying a new driveway was hard to manage. But in the meantime, daily fines of $75 continued to accrue, eventually reaching a total of $16,125 with interest—”far greater than the cost of an entirely new driveway,” she notes in the lawsuit that she filed against the city in February 2021.

In 2015, Martinez was cited for a fence that had been knocked down by a storm. Again, the repairs necessary to bring her into compliance were more expensive than she could immediately afford. While she waited for her insurance company to pay her claim for the fence, daily fines of $125 accumulated, eventually hitting a total of $47,375 with interest—”several times the cost of the repair and substantially more than the cost of a completely new fence,” according to her complaint.

Finally, Martinez was cited in 2019 for improperly parking cars on her own property. At the time, she was living with her three children, her mother, and her sister. Martinez, her two adult children, and her sister all had cars that they used to travel from home to work and back. Her street has no curbs and is not wide enough to accommodate parked cars. Since Martinez and her relatives could not legally and safely park on the street, the driveway seemed like the only viable option. When all four cars were parked at Martinez’s home, two of them sometimes extended slightly beyond the driveway, which is flanked by her lawn and a walkway.

As Martinez’s complaint notes, “parking on one’s own front yard space, even a tiny bit, is illegal in Lantana.” The penalty is $250 per day and fines continue to accrue until a city inspector verifies that the violation has been corrected. Although Martinez says she promptly fixed the parking issue by making sure no car was touching her grass and left a voicemail message with the code enforcement office requesting a compliance check, no inspector came by. Unbeknownst to her, the fines continued to accumulate for more than a year.

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Government Agencies Illegally Soliciting and Potentially Entrapping Non-Citizens to Register to Vote

Government Agencies are illegally soliciting non-citizens to vote and potentially entrapping them.  Government workers who perform these acts are committing felonies.

Joe Hoft previously reported on how Illegals are being registered to vote in Florida.  This is likely the case in many other states.

The path non-citizens who cross our border illegally take to get on voter rolls in Florida is as follows.  There are some loopholes and practices that allow this to happen:

  1. Cross the US border illegally
  2. Get arrested and get immigration court or asylum application paperwork
  3. Use immigration court or asylum application paperwork to get a Florida driver’s license, state ID (per s 322.08), or a social security number
  4. Sign up for Florida food or medical assistance using the same immigration court or asylum paperwork.
  5. An illegal will then receive a solicitation to register to vote in the mail from the government because they signed up for assistance. Just fill out and mail in the voter registration application provided with the solicitation letter (per interpretation of s 97.058). A solicitation letter from The Department of Children and Family Services to a person that appears to be a non-citizen based on a public records search is attached. The Spanish version is what was mailed.
  6. Register to vote using your driver license or social security number.  If you have neither, just check the box for no ID.  No one checks to see if you are a citizen.  They just check to see you checked the box on the application saying you are a citizen (per interpretation of s 98.045).
  7. Vote.  If you get caught plead plausible deniability or entrapment because you were solicited by the government to register to vote.

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Exactly What Are WHO Member States Voting for?

With Member States of the World Health Organization (WHO) negotiating new agreements to centralize management of pandemics with an annual budget of over $31.5 billion, it would be reasonable to assume that everyone was clear on what a pandemic actually is. Surprisingly, this is not the case. Although countries will be voting in two months on a new Pandemic Agreement and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) to grant the WHO wide authority over pandemic management, there is no universally-agreed definition of “pandemic.” What degree of severity is required? How widespread must it be? What proportion of the population must be at risk? 

An outbreak of common cold crossing borders fits many pandemic definitions, as does a repeat of the medieval Black Death. International agreements are normally formed around a definable problem, but the world is about to invest tens of billions without a solid basis to predict costs and benefits. In other words, there is no clear agreement on what the World Health Assembly is actually agreeing to.

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Republicans Split on Whether FBI Should Be Able To Snoop Without a Warrant

Section 702, the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authority used to justify snooping on Americans’ digital communications without a warrant, is set to sunset on April 19 if lawmakers don’t act. Many in Congress—including Republicans and Democrats—want Section 702 reauthorization that includes reforms to shield innocent Americans from warrantless surveillance and to hold federal agents accountable for misuse.

But as a “compromise” reauthorization measure comes before Congress this week, House Republicans are split on what sort of reform is really needed—and the side dismissive of civil liberties seems to be winning out.

“The House appears ready to reauthorize FISA 702—which has been abused literally hundreds of thousands of times to spy on Americans without a warrant—without requiring the government to get a warrant,” complained Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) on X (formerly Twitter) this week. A proposal put forth by Lee and Illinois Republican Sen. Dick Durbin would substantially limit warrantless access to communications obtained under Section 702. But House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.) “has declined to bring that bill to the floor, opting instead to have members vote on a ‘compromise’ measure—one that would compromise the rights of Americans if passed without amendments,” as Lee put it.

Johnson’s measure—H.R. 7888, the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA)—was adopted 9 to 2 by the House Committee on the Rules yesterday.

RISAA and several amendments to it are now expected to get a full House vote tomorrow. And “the Senate is anticipated to pass whatever bill the House sends its way,” notes Axios.

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