Lysander Spooner on vice…
Tag: police state
Inside the mysterious suicides of two Las Vegas moms who accused cops of cover-up
Two mothers — one a former Las Vegas judge-turned-vigilante — committed suicide within five months of each other after they both spent years fighting the Las Vegas Metro Police Department over what they alleged was a cover-up of a still-unsolved double homicide tied to underage sex trafficking.
Judge Melanie Andress-Tobiasson, 55, who stepped down from the bench a year ago to avoid an ethics probe, killed herself Jan. 20 at her $2 million Vegas mansion. The Clark County coroner’s office said she died from a gunshot wound.
Andress-Tobiasson’s one-time friend Connie Land, 53, shot herself to death Aug. 10, 2022, at her Las Vegas home after crusading for six years for justice for her daughter.
Land’s daughter Sydney Land, 21, was murdered along with her 19-year-old boyfriend, Nehemiah “Neo” Kauffman, a reported pimp, in October 2016. The homicides remain unsolved.
A year before the murders, Andress-Tobiasson began tipping police off to what she claimed was underage sex trafficking in order to protect her own teenage daughter and others, according to her statements on podcasts and court documents.
Anthony ‘Tony’ Mitchell froze to death after guards put him in walk-in freezer at Alabama jail
An Alabama man froze to death inside a county jail after he was placed inside a walk-in freezer or another cold area by guards, a recently filed lawsuit alleges.
The family of Anthony “Tony” Mitchell says that more than a dozen jail officials in Walker County abused him and then schemed to cover up the alleged mistreatment.
Mitchell dealt with “hellish” conditions inside the jail for roughly two weeks before his death following his arrest in mid-January, his grieving mother, Margaret Mitchell, argues in the suit.
“While Tony languished naked and dying of hypothermia in the early morning hours of Jan. 26 and his chances for survival trickled away, numerous corrections officers and medical staff wandered over to his open cell door to spectate and be entertained by his condition,” the bombshell complaint claims.
A Walker County sheriff’s official told a relative that Mitchell, 33, would receive help while inside the jail after his arrest, but instead he was tased by guards and housed in the jail naked, due to the facility’s suicide watch policy, the lawsuit speculates.
Mitchell suffered from drug addiction and faced both mental and physical health woes, according to his family.
Australia’s Drug Regulator Hid Child Vaccine Deaths to “Maintain Public Confidence”
Australia’s drug regulator hid vaccine deaths from the public, concerned that “disclosure could undermine public confidence”, it has been revealed.
The hidden deaths include two children, seven and nine years old, who both suffered fatal cardiac arrests which the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) assessed as causally linked to Covid vaccination,
The revelations come in documents obtained under Freedom of Information (FOI) request by Dr. Melissa McCann. Dr McCann shared the shocking revelation in her address at the Covid Vaccine Conference, hosted by Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party over the weekend in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. The event featured leading ICU physician Dr. Pierre Kory, cardiologist and epidemiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, and McCullough’s collaborator, author John Leake.
Addressing sold-out crowds, Dr. McCann shared the extraordinary lengths she had to go to to extract causality assessment documents relating to the TGA’s investigation of reported deaths after Covid vaccination, which were obtained under FOI request in a process that took six months. Dr McCann lodged the request after seeing an unexpectedly high number of patients coming through her clinic experiencing adverse events after immunisation (AEFIs). She also noticed a high number of serious AEFI reports in the in the DAEN database, including the reported death of a 14 year-old in October 2021.
In her original FOI request, Dr. McCann requested causality assessments for all of the reported deaths in the DAEN database. This request was denied due to the large scope, and in negotiation with the TGA, Dr. McCann agreed to revise down the request to the 11 documents that were eventually handed over, of which 10 related to DAEN death reports.
When the documents were finally provided to Dr. McCann in July 2022, she was dismayed to find that there were multiple reports that the TGA had assessed as causally linked to Covid vaccination, but, with the exception of one death, had not been reported in the TGA’s regular Safety Reports.
The UK will treat online images of immigrants crossing the Channel as a criminal offence
On 17 January, the United Kingdom (UK) government announced that online platforms will have to proactively remove images of immigrants crossing the Channel in small boats under a new amendment to be tabled to the Online Safety Bill. The announcement, intended to bolster the UK’s hostile immigration policy, has been met with concern among the British public and charities working with people on the move . However, it does helpfully confirm the way that this Bill could be manoeuvred to political ends.
How will the new amendment be enforced?
In fact, the proposed amendment says nothing about small boats crossing the Channel. It supports an existing provision in the Bill under the heading of “Assisting Illegal Immigration” Schedule 7 (22). It relies on the interpretation of an obscure text from a 1971 law, and on an opaque requirement for online platforms to “prevent users encountering” this content.
The amendment is to be tabled by the government in the House of Lords. in response to a politically-motivated amendment proposed by 24 Conservative Party members of Parliament (MPs), and led by the MP for Dover, Nathalie Elphicke.
Mrs Elphicke’s amendment called for the removal of “content that may result in serious harm or death to a child while crossing the English Channel with the aim of entering the United Kingdom in a vessel unsuited or unsafe for those purposes.”
It was positioned within a provision about content harmful to children. Despite the clumsy drafting, the intention was clear and it won sufficient support to force the government to re-draft it.
As a result, the government’s proposal will amend the illegal content provisions in the Bill.
The content to be removed under these provisions is defined by a list of 33 criminal offences. The government wants to add a new offence under Section 24 of the 1971 Immigration Act, which is about unlawful entry to the UK. The amendment will support the reference to Section 25 of the 1971 Act that is already in the Bill.
The 1971 provisions have been updated in Sections 40 and 41 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, the government’s most recent change to immigration law.
In order to force providers to remove the content, the government is relying on “Inchoate offences”. These include aiding and abetting those offences. The government argues that aiding and abetting would include posting videos of people crossing the Channel from France to the UK in small, over-crowded boats. It would also include videos of people trying to enter the UK by climbing aboard lorries.
FOIA emails may be ‘breadcrumbs’ leading to government-Twitter election censorship collusion
Summer 2022 emails between participants in a federal misinformation subcommittee, recently turned over in response to public records requests, are prompting renewed calls for Congress to investigate the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s role in shaping what Americans can see.
They apparently show a Twitter executive fired by Elon Musk last fall strategizing with a leader in the CISA-blessed Election Integrity Partnership on how to overcome internal objections to their plans for the Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation and Disinformation Subcommittee, part of CISA’s Cybersecurity Advisory Committee.
An agency under the Department of Homeland Security that touts itself as the “quarterback for the federal cybersecurity team,” CISA has become a lightning rod for public anger as it has sought to carve itself a role as stealth arbiter of domestic political debate about election security through a network of corporate and nonprofit information control surrogates.
“We may have discovered breadcrumbs showing the close relationship between one of the government’s ordained censorship captains and her Big Tech ally who, as we’ve learned from the Twitter Files, executed government-ordered censorship,” the Functional Government Initiative, which made the initial public records request, told Just the News.
Cop Arrested After He Was Caught Dumping Naked Body of 16yo Girl in the Woods
The residents of Norcross have been searching for 16-year-old Susana Morales since she went missing on July 26, 2022. She was last seen walking home on surveillance footage but tragically would never arrive. Her disappearance had been a mystery until last week when her body was discovered 20 miles away. According to an arrest warrant, she was dumped there by disgraced Doraville police officer Miles Bryant.
“It’s unbelievable honestly, there is no words that I can say to explain it,” said Jasmine Morales, Susana’s sister. “It sucks that it took so long but I guess with him being an officer has something to do with that.”
On Monday, Bryant was charged with concealing Susana’s death — her body was discovered five days earlier. Bryant has only been charged with one count of concealing the death of another and one count of falsely reporting a crime.
According to the arrest warrant, police say Bryant dumped Susana’s naked body in a patch of woods in Dacula. Medical examiners are still trying to determine the teen’s cause of death. The warrant states that police suspect Bryant of rape, murder, and other offenses, although he’s yet to be charged with those crimes.
According to court records, Bryant lived near Susana. Local news, 11 Alive interviewed neighbors who said Bryant was normal.
One of those neighbors shared cell phone videos, showing what they described as investigators collecting a bed sheet from Bryant’s personal car. In one of the videos, his police car was being towed away.
“It’s hard to put my mind around it right now, that’s this person who lived in this complex did that,” said another resident who asked not to disclose her identity out of fear of retaliation. That neighbor says while she didn’t know Bryant personally he has introduced himself several times as a police officer who also moonlights as security at the complex.
Neighbors said Byrant’s demeanor during the past six months wasn’t alarming.
“He was very normal, just smiling laughing, living his life,” the neighbor said. “Poor baby laid out in a field somewhere. Are you serious, how can you be that cold-hearted? How is somebody that cold-hearted?”
Though much of the media is referring to Bryant as a “former officer,” he was a cop until Monday. He was only fired after being charged with dumping the naked body of a teenager in the woods.
The Argument That ‘America Has Gone Too Far in Legalizing Vice’ Ignores the Cost of Prohibition
In a recent Atlantic essay, physician Matthew Loftus argues that “America has gone too far in legalizing vice.” Because people do not always make rational decisions and sometimes develop self-destructive habits, Loftus argues, the government should make it harder, not easier, to engage in pleasurable activities such as gambling and cannabis consumption. “Just as highways have guardrails for the moments when a driver isn’t exercising perfect self-control,” he writes, “so we also need guardrails to help people from driving off cliffs of vice.”
To his credit, Loftus does not draw arbitrary distinctions between potentially harmful habits based on their current legal status. He argues that alcohol prohibition was successful in reducing the harm caused by excessive drinking, for example, and seems to understand that any pleasure-providing or stress-relieving activity can be the focus of an addiction—a point that psychologists such as Stanton Peele and Jeffrey Schaler have been making for many years.
But Loftus exaggerates how often that happens, obscuring the implication that the government should impose restrictions on everyone based on the mistakes of a minority. He cherry-picks data to support his argument that liberalization of marijuana policies has been harmful. And while he emphasizes human fallibility as it relates to “vice” itself, he ignores its perils in formulating laws and regulations aimed at curtailing “vice.”
The term that Loftus uses to describe things that people enjoy is telling. The “vice” label implies that even occasional or moderate gambling, drinking, or cannabis consumption is morally suspect and provides no value that is worth considering. That is convenient for the argument in favor of paternalistic policies like the ones that Loftus supports. But it ignores the reality that people who engage in such activities typically do not develop life-disrupting habits they ultimately regret. By and large, these activities are life-enhancing rather than life-disrupting.
Loftus implies otherwise. “Our hearts and minds are shaped not only by reason but also by our experiences, affections, and, most important, our habits, which are just as often inexplicably self-destructive as they are reasonable,” he writes.
That is an empirical claim, implying that roughly half of the people who gamble, drink, or use marijuana develop “self-destructive” habits. The evidence does not support that claim.
Covid Emergency, Climate Emergency: Same Thing
In February 2022, 1,140 organizations sent President Biden a letter urging him to declare a “climate emergency.” A group of US Senators did the same, in October 2022, and a House bill, introduced in 2021, also called on the president to “declare a national climate emergency under the National Emergencies Act.”
Biden has considered declaring such an emergency, but so far he has declined, to the disappointment of many progressives.
The United Nations (UN) has urged all countries to declare a climate emergency. The state of Hawaii and 170 local US jurisdictions have declared some version of one. So have 38 countries, including European Union members and the UK, and local jurisdictions around the world, together encompassing about 13 percent of the world’s population.
Hillary Clinton was reportedly prepared to declare a “climate emergency” if she had won the 2016 election.
A “climate emergency” is in the zeitgeist. Those words were surely uttered by the billionaires, technocrats and corporate CEOs attending the recent World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos.
But what does it actually mean for the president of the US to officially declare a “climate emergency?”
Most people don’t realize that under US law, a national emergency declaration triggers a set of emergency powers that allows a president to act without the need for further legislation.
The Brennan Center for Justice compiled a list of the 123 statutory powers that may become available to the president upon declaration of a national emergency (plus 13 that become available when Congress declares a national emergency).
The scope of these powers is difficult to summarize, except to say that if exercised to their maximum extent, they potentially encompass vast areas of American life.
For civil libertarians across the political spectrum, from left to right, a “climate emergency” should be a focus of concern.
Even environmentalists who may instinctively and understandably support the idea should be worried about the potential for the authoritarian model of “emergency” governance that arose during COVID-19 to overtake climate policy.
One can believe in protecting and preserving the planet, as I do, while insisting on environmental policies that are consistent with democracy, civil liberties, and human rights.
Elements of the left and right should be coming together to reject demands that we sacrifice democratic norms, rights, and freedoms for flimsy promises of safety from political and economic elites who seek to exploit a crisis — a cynical ploy that COVID-19 thoroughly exposed.
Trump Plans to Bring Back Firing Squads, Group Executions if He Retakes White House
“WHAT DO YOU think of firing squads?”
That’s the question Donald Trump repeatedly asked some close associates in the run-up to the 2024 presidential campaign, three people familiar with the situation tell Rolling Stone.
It’s not an idle inquiry: The former president, if re-elected, is still committed to expanding the use of the federal death penalty and bringing back banned methods of execution, the sources say. He has even, one of the sources recounts, mused about televising footage of executions, including showing condemned prisoners in the final moments of their lives.
Specifically, Trump has talked about bringing back death by firing squad, by hanging, and, according to two of the sources, possibly even by guillotine. He has also, sources say, discussed group executions. Trump has floated these ideas while discussing planned campaign rhetoric and policy desires, as well as his disdain for President Biden’s approach to crime.
In at least one instance late last year, according to the third source, who has direct knowledge of the matter, Trump privately mused about the possibility of creating a flashy, government-backed video-ad campaign that would accompany a federal revival of these execution methods. In Trump’s vision, these videos would include footage from these new executions, if not from the exact moments of death. “The [former] president believes this would help put the fear of God into violent criminals,” this source says. “He wanted to do some of these [things] when he was in office, but for whatever reasons didn’t have the chance.”
A Trump spokesman denies Trump had mused about a video-ad campaign. “More ridiculous and fake news from idiots who have no idea what they’re talking about,” the spokesman writes in an email. “Either these people are fabricating lies out of thin air, or Rolling Stone is allowing themselves to be duped by these morons.”
Trump’s enthusiasm for grisly video campaigns has been documented before, including in an anecdote from a former aide that had the then-president demanding footage of “people dying in a ditch” and “bodies stacked on top of bodies” so that his administration could “scare kids so much that they will never touch a single drug in their entire life.”
Hellbound and Down 
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