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Tag: police state
Philadelphia Considers Zoning Restrictions on Still-Illegal Recreational Pot Shops
Recreational marijuana isn’t legal yet in Pennsylvania. That hasn’t stopped Philadelphia politicians from trying to future-proof their zoning ordinances to block recreational sales.
Philadelphia Councilmembers Brian O’Neill and Curtis Jones have proposed amendments to the city’s zoning code that would preemptively prohibit existing medical marijuana businesses in two overlay districts they represent from participating in recreational sales.
The prohibition would affect five existing medical marijuana stores, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer, which reported on the zoning amendments earlier today.
The immediate practical impacts of the amendments are minimal, given that recreational marijuana is still illegal in Pennsylvania. State lawmakers are nevertheless working on various proposals for legalizing recreational sales. Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, has endorsed legalizing (and heavily taxing) recreational sales.
Industry advocates say this will unfairly penalize existing medical marijuana businesses when recreational sales are eventually legalized, all because they opened up in the wrong part of town.
“If you set up a system where four or five stores can’t sell adult use and then 16 can, people are going to go to the ones” that can sell to recreational customers, says Jamie Ware, president of the Pennsylvania Cannabis Coalition (a trade association).
Ware is also a senior vice president with Holistic Industries which operates one of the Philadelphia dispensaries that would be affected by O’Neill and Jones’ zoning amendment.
Existing businesses, she notes, are locked into longer-term commercial leases, so they can’t easily move to avoid the restrictions. If the current medical system is any guide to how future recreational businesses will be regulated, transferring a license to a new location would require state approval and could take years.
O’Neill did not immediately respond to Reason‘s request for comment. Jones told the Inquirer that while medical sales haven’t created problems, recreational sales will bring a less desirable crowd, necessitating the restrictions.
The FBI Declassifies Data on a Famous Cryptozoologist / Ufologist
If you’re interested in UFOs, aliens and mysterious creatures, you’ll definitely want to see this: in just a couple of days ago, the FBI declassified its file on Ivan Sanderson (monster-hunter, author and Flying Saucer chaser). There are some intriguing stories in the file. And, one or two characters provide intriguing material. As I said, the man in person was the late Ivan Sanderson. If you’re not acquainted with him, here’s a bit of material on the man and his work. The American Philosophical Society said: “In the 1950s Sanderson became increasingly interested in the study of the unexplained, including cryptozoology and ufology. Sanderson founded the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained (SITU) to look into such topics as UFOs, the Loch Ness monster, Sasquatch, the abominable snowman, and the Bermuda Triangle among others.” Indeed, throughout his life, Sanderson traveled everywhere and had wild encounters of the monstrous nature. There was, however, something else: namely, the interest of Sanderson by the FBI. With that said, let’s see what J. Edgar Hoover’s agents have in their website. Don’t miss it. You’ll want to read it for yourself.
A Rural, Waldorf Microschool Gets Shut Down By State Regulators
Ariel Maguire gathered together with other moms in her rural area of the Big Island of Hawaii to create a child-centered educational solution for local families. It was late 2021 and the parents realized that nearly two years of pandemic policies had left their kids behind both academically and socially.
There weren’t a lot of child care or early-education options nearby. “The closest place to send our kids would be a little over an hour drive each way and it has a huge waitlist,” Maguire told me in a recent podcast interview. “We were all struggling because we’d been stuck at home with our kids without community for a couple of years and needed to get back to work.”
So Maguire and the other moms decided to build what they couldn’t find. They established their program, Kulike Learning Garden, as a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, as well as a private membership association, or PMA, that works legally like a social club to facilitate voluntary association within a cooperative community of shared roles and expectations. They hired an experienced Waldorf teacher, and opened their Waldorf-inspired, child-focused, nature-based microschool on a family farm in January 2022 with about 15 children, ages three to six. Parent volunteers shared in the teaching responsibilities.
Over the following months, the microschool, which cost families $600 a month, flourished. “The kids were all thriving,” said Maguire, an accountant and mom of four young girls. “The feedback we were getting was that the kids were doing so much better at home because of this new routine. A lot of their behaviors that we were experiencing during the pandemic had calmed down. The kids were having a blast.”
Then, in November 2022, officials from the Hawaii Department of Human Services showed up on the farm property. “They were very Men in Black style,” recalled Maguire. “They had glasses on, masks on, multiple cars. A representative from the Attorney General’s office was there, and they were interrogating us, really making us out to seem like we were doing something really wrong, but we truly felt that we weren’t.”
One week later, Maguire and the other parents got served with a $55,500 fine and a court date for operating as an “unlicensed preschool.” They tried to challenge the state regulators, but it seemed like an uphill battle. “Circuit court takes at least a year to get through, and so looking at the attorney costs of doing that and the time it would require of me, and meanwhile, I have these four children who I’m trying to educate and prepare for life. I just didn’t have the time or the money to do that,” said Maguire. So she and the other moms agreed to shut down their microschool and pay a $5,000 fine.
“It was devastating for all of these children and families to suddenly close at the end of December,” said Maguire. “Everybody is homeschooling right now because there’s really no other option. We have play dates and meet up at the beach or the market, and that’s really it.”
Police are ‘assessing’ video of Laurence Fox burning ‘LGBTQ+’ bunting in his garden while actor says he ‘hopes officers pay me a visit’ following Father’s Day stunt
The Met Police are assessing the video of Laurence Fox burning LGBTQ+ bunting in his back garden.
Fox, who is preparing to compete for Boris Johnson‘s Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency, used a lighter at his home to set the display on fire on Father’s Day.
An outraged Twitter user claimed to have reported the video to police as a ‘hate crime‘, which Fox has slammed as being ‘arbitrary nonsense’.
The actor-turned-political activist added: ‘Thank you from the bottom of my heart for reporting me.’
Fox had previously said the flag in his video – which is the Progress Pride version created in 2018 – ‘is nothing to do with the original Pride flag which was to represent hard-fought-for gay and lesbian rights, which everybody would support.’
Feds May Need Warrants To Search Cell Phones at the Border After All
The role of smart phones as snitches is well-established, with people paying for their handy communications capabilities while the treacherous devices track us and reveal details of our lives. Even as the government spoofs cellphone towers to locate phone users, or purchases commercial data about our movements, border agents also insist they can, at will, search the phones of Americans returning home. But last month a federal judge ruled that a free pass to probe electronic devices is too broad, and that Americans enjoy some protections at the border of the sort they have elsewhere.
In this latest case, United States v. Smith, Jatiek Smith, the subject of a federal investigation, was stopped at the airport in Newark on his return from Jamaica. As detailed by U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff, federal agents “forced him to turn over his cellphone and its password. They reviewed the phone manually and created and saved an electronic copy of it as it existed as of that date and time – all without a search warrant.”
Wait. No warrant? Unfortunately, yes.
ARMED ATF & IRS AGENTS HIT MONTANA GUN STORE WITH “SOVIET-STYLE INTIMIDATION RAID”
Heavily armed agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) raided a gun store in Great Falls, Montana, last week in what was described by a local lawmaker as a “Soviet-style intimidation raids.”
Tom Van Hoose, the owner of Highwood Creek Outfitters, told the local media outlet KRTV that 20 heavily armed agents swarmed his gun shop on Wednesday morning, confiscated 13 years of 4473 forms, and copied the firearm acquisition and disposition book.
“The fact that they think we make so much money as a gun business that they had to come investigate all the thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars whatever it is we supposedly absconded with, anybody that knows the margins in the gun business knows they’re not that high,” said Van Hoose.
He said the reason for the raid is unclear. He believes it could be part of a nationwide trend by Biden’s ATF:
“I can only assume that it’s because of the style of weapons that we have and the press that’s so against them.
“The current administration seems to be hell-bent on getting those guns out of the hands of average Americans.”
Van Hoose spoke to the firearms blog The Truth About Guns, stating that the IRS claimed he had underreported and failed to report millions of dollars of income. The shop owner denied the accusation.
On Friday, Congressman Matt Rosendale sent a letter to ATF Director Steven Dettelbach and IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, asking for answers and calling the raid “outrageous.”
“Under Director Dettelbach’s leadership of the ATF, a pattern of intimidation and harassment against hardworking Americans has emerged – Montanans will not tolerate these political witch hunts. I remind both Director Dettelbach and Commissioner Werfel that Congress has the power of the purse, and I will ensure that funding for these agencies is not weaponized against the American people,” Rosendale said in his letter.
He continued: “I request that the ATF and IRS cease conducting these Soviet-style intimidation raids.”
As Violent Crime Skyrockets, Cops Arrest Innocent Man for Chalking Sidewalk Without a Permit
Earlier this year, San Antonio Police Chief William McManus presented his crime report to a public safety committee. It showed that crimes against people, property, and society skyrocketed in 2022 when compared to the previous year. McManus told city leaders he is ‘strongly concerned’ about the violence.
“With homicide, we saw a pretty dramatic increase of 43%,” said McManus. “[There were] 231 homicides in 2022.”
One would think that given this shocking increase in criminal behavior that police would turn their efforts to prevent such things. But one would be wrong.
In the throes of this stark rise in crime, where law enforcement officers can’t even be bothered to respond to 911 calls about serious offenses such as stolen vehicles and assaults, the Leon Valley Police Department found the time and resources to apprehend an innocent chalk artist. This artist was arrested on public property, moments before a storm, for the crime of sketching non-permanent designs on the sidewalk. Yes, you read it right.
Lakey Hinson, a chalk enthusiast and the victim of this absurd overreach of authority, was merely adorning a public pavement in front of the Randolph-Brooks Federal Credit Union one balmy afternoon on May 15. He was interrupted mid-art by officers Jorge Breton and Alan Gonzalez. The veteran officer and his trainee had embarked on this adventure in response to an anonymous tip of ‘public property defacement’, as narrated by the Express-News.
“We Are Restricting Freedom… For The Common Good”: Irish Green Party Calls For Limiting Free Speech
The Irish Green Party followed many on the left around the world, including our own Democratic Party, this week and came out for censorship and speech controls. Indeed, the party went full Orwellian as its chairwoman Pauline O’Reilly called for “restricting freedom” to protect it.
O’Reilly’s comments are part of the introduction of the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022. We previously discussed this massive assault on free speech.
The legislation that would criminalize “incitement to violence or hatred against” people with “protected characteristics,” as well as “condoning, denying or grossly trivialising genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace.”
Limiting free speech has become an article of faith for many on the left. I have written about my distress (as someone who grew up in a liberal, politically active Democratic family in Chicago) in watching the abandonment of free speech values by the party. Democratic leaders now uniformly call for censorship and speech regulations. President Biden even charged that companies who refused to censor opposing views on social media were “killing people.” Others have denounced free speech as “a white man’s obsession.”
The anti-free speech movement has become openly Orwellian in claiming to protect freedom by limiting freedom. It also employs using terms like disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation to obscure their effort to silence those with opposing views. Rather than use “censorship,” they refer to “content moderation.”
That effort was on full display this week in Ireland with this anti-free speech legislation.
Perceived Stigma of Cannabis Patients
A June 2022 study entitled “Perceived Stigma of Patients Undergoing Treatment with Cannabis-Based Medicinal Products” that was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health explored the potential impact of stigma on medical cannabis patients.
The study’s authors noted that “it is well documented that stigma can reduce utilization of healthcare services and can negatively impact treatment.” They reported that stigma can also lead to chronic stress and anxiety, “in addition to subsequent mental and physical problems that can cause individuals to feel isolated and withdrawn.”
Perceived Stigma of Cannabis Patients. “While there is a growing body of evidence on the associated effects of cannabis-based medicinal products on health-related quality of life in several health conditions, there is a paucity of knowledge on the prevalence and subsequent effects of stigma on current and prospective patients” in the United Kingdom, reported the study.
The study observed that “evidence from countries which have greater experience with medical cannabis therapies shows stigma to be a factor in both prescribing practice and patient perception.”
The study observed that “evidence from countries which have greater experience with medical cannabis therapies shows stigma to be a factor in both prescribing practice and patient perception.” Interviews of Canadian patients revealed that the most common sources of stigma were “health care providers, law enforcement, and close relatives.”
Hellbound and Down 
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