Tag: police state

LORD ASHCROFT: ID card scheme is a classic Starmerite intervention – it’s expensive, intrusive and utterly pointless

Kemi Badenoch‘s skewering of Keir Starmer at Wednesday’s PMQs was a highlight in what has been a relatively good couple of weeks for the Tory leader.

If the Conservatives don’t exactly have a spring in their step, they are at least enjoying a sigh of relief. Their conference produced some policy ideas worth talking about and Badenoch delivered a punchy and humorous speech that stilled the endless chatter about her leadership, at least for a time.

Of course, most people have better things to do than pay attention to party conferences. But in this case, the task was to shore up her position and consolidate the Tories’ diminished base.

My latest polling suggests she succeeded in this crucial (if limited and short-term) objective. The number of Conservatives who would rather see her than Starmer or Nigel Farage as PM has risen sharply, pushing her rating up among voters as a whole.

The bad news is that this has yet to inject any life into her party’s standing overall. Insiders now say she is in a race against time to make that happen before the local elections next May.

In my survey, voters tended to think yet another change at the top would show the Tories had learned nothing about why they lost. But when panic sets in, politics takes on a logic and momentum of its own.

That’s not to say Badenoch is entirely at the mercy of events.

One thing that holds the party back is that the numbers saying it has changed since its defeat has flatlined all year. 

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U.K. seeking to censor Americans again

Incredibly, the U.K. wants to enforce its draconian censorship laws in the United States.

According to Data Fidelity, an Australian tech site:

Internal communications now made public by the US House Judiciary Committee shed light on a pattern of escalating pressure by the UK’s “communications regulator,” Ofcom, aimed at pushing US-based tech platforms like Rumble and Reddit into adopting strict speech standards, even in apparent disregard for national boundaries and free speech protections.

The emails expose how Ofcom has been leaning on Rumble to align itself with the UK’s Online Safety Act, a censorship law that vastly expands the state’s oversight of online content under the guise of child protection and harm prevention.

Take to the internet or social media to criticize the LGBTQ community or Islam?

You may be paid a visit by the constabulary.

Criticize the U.K.’s leaders?

You might get to visit Scotland Yard.

Criticize gay, trans, or Muslim U.K. leaders?

God help you. (Not that many people in formerly Jolly Olde England believe in the God of the Bible anymore. Which may explain the current state of affairs in Britain.)

It is utterly preposterous that any nation, let alone one as diminished yet allegedly tolerant as the U.K., would seek to enforce and impose its own anti-speech, anti-freedom agenda on a foreign land.

Talk about digital colonization and cultural imperialism!

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Michigan Lawmakers Consider Bills To Change Legal Marijuana Possession Limits And Alter Industry Disciplinary Rules

Four marijuana-related bills were up for consideration before a House panel on Thursday, with one aiming to upend rules on the legal amount of regulated marijuana a person is allowed to possess, both in plant and concentrate form.

Members of the House Regulatory Reform Committee discussed but did not amend or advance House Bill House 5104, Bill 5105, House Bill 5106 and House Bill 5107.

Derek Sova, a policy and legislative assistant for the Cannabis Regulatory Agency, told the committee previously that Michigan’s legal marijuana industry faced several challenges, and that two of those big hurdles were large illicit grow operations and the agency’s inability to go after bad actors because their licenses had expired.

The series of bills before the committee would address those concerns.

House Bill 5105 and House Bill 5107 are sponsored by state Reps. Pauline Wendzel (R-Watervliet) and Mike Hoadley (R-Au Gres), respectively. The bills would in tandem create new penalties for cultivating, delivering and processing black market marijuana, but also change the amount of marijuana a person is legally allowed to possess in plant and concentrate form.

The bills are tie-barred together, meaning both would have to jointly clear the Legislature and be signed by the governor to become law.

Under Wendzel’s bill, a person would be guilty of a misdemeanor if they possess between 10 and 25 kilograms, or between 50 and 100 plants, or between one and 2.5 kilograms of marijuana concentrate. The penalty would change to up to one year in jail or a $20,000 fine, or both.

Keeping between 25 and 125 kilograms, or between 100 and 500 plants, or between 2.5 and 12.5 kilograms of marijuana concentrate would become a felony punishable by two years in prison or a $500,000 fine, or both.

It would also be a felony offense to:

  • Keep between 125 and 250 kilograms, or between 500 and 1,000 plants, or between 12.5 and 25 kilograms. That could net a person four years in prison or a $2 million fine or both; and
  • Keep 250 kilograms or more, or 1,000 plants or more, or 25 kilograms or more of marijuana concentrate. The punishment there would be up to 10 years in prison or a $10 million fine, or both.

Sponsored by state Rep. Kristian Grant (D-Grand Rapids), House Bill 5104 would allow the Cannabis Regulatory Agency to sanction a person even if they are no longer a licensee or if they are no longer operating a marijuana facility.

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They’re Coming For Your Wood-Burning Stove… Again

The weather is getting colder, and that means getting back to anti-wood-burning propaganda.

Did you know a wood burner can kill you? They pollute more than cars and cause cancer, “similar to cigarette smoke,” and so on.

Jeremy Vine is asking if it’s time to ban them.

This isn’t new – for want of a better word – “information”. We covered this last Christmas. Then over the summer, it was folded in with a barrage of “indoor air quality” fear-mongering, only to re-emerge now that the days are getting shorter again.

Sort of like reverse-hibernation.

A trendy wood burning stove almost killed me…they need to be banned before they do anymore damage

…screams the Daily Mail.

I like the word “trendy” — they keep using it — it’s so shamelessly manipulative, painting the humble stove as some pretentious luxury accessory, rather than the basic means of heating your home for literal millennia.

Anyway, the crux of the story is that this lady – Lizzie – had a severe asthma attack, and she “believes” it was linked to wood-burning stoves.

So they should be banned. Or something.

Then they quote a doctor:

‘This is why we want the government to launch a public awareness campaign on the health impacts and sources of pollution to empower the public to make cleaner choices and protect lung health, and other people like Lizzie.’

Then come the graphs. It’s all very predictable.

The Telegraph, more refined and less hysterical than the Daily Mail (which admittedly isn’t saying much) goes with…

Wood burners are bad for you. Here’s why you didn’t notice.

Detailing how new research has shown that wood burners are really terrible for everyone who uses them, but we just never noticed before.

Why didn’t we notice?

Oh, because the people who use them are “mostly” otherwise healthy and wealthy so the data was disguised by demographics.

Now, you might think that “research” which concludes “wood burning might make you sick, but being poor, eating badly or smoking are worse” is a shoe-in for the Well Duh! Prize at the annual Waste of Time Awards, but you’re wrong. It’s very serious.

Anyway, here’s their version of the doctor quote:

“It would be good to see increased awareness on the impact of wood burners, with clearer information and guidance from the Government on the health impact, as well as increased regulation around domestic wood-burning.”

No graphs this time, which is nice. But notice, like the Daily Mail article, the repeated association of wood burning with the upper class. It’s a luxury, not a right. That’s the message. The “expert” in the Telegraph even says, “primarily the reason for having a wood burner is the aesthetic of it.”

That’s a common sentiment, always presented without evidence.

That’s something I still find hilarious about the press — perhaps the British press in particular. These are identical stories, just in a house style. It’s like AI image filters, where you upload a photo of yourself and ask, “Show me this image as if it were painted by Van Gogh.” Or Rembrandt. Or Picasso.

“Tell me burning wood causes cancer in the style of the Guardian”. Or the Mirror. Or The Sun.

The aesthetic changes, the message does not.

And, of course, it’s not just the UK. When is it ever?

The devolved Scottish Parliament has already banned wood burners in newly built homes, with some local councils banning the installation of wood-burners in their council houses.

The anti-stove agenda clearly summers in Australia, because back in July, ABC were reporting on “the silent killer” of wood smoke, and how experts were calling for bans.

In New Zealand, government-commissioned research is blaming not just wood-burning stoves, but open fires, gas heaters and gas ovens for thousands of deaths per year.

In Canada, British Columbia is enforcing a registry for those who want to burn solid fuel domestically.

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The Government Shutdown Isn’t Stopping Trump From Amassing ‘Emergency’ Powers

Usually when we’re in the midst of a government shutdown, I’m in a good mood. Sure, recent shutdowns haven’t accomplished much in terms of shrinking the cost or scope of the federal government in the long run, but it’s nice to walk around feeling a little less governed than usual.

But even that small pleasure has turned sour. Yes, fiscal restraint matters. It matters to this magazine, which has made cutting spending the subject of a greater percentage of our cover stories than perhaps any other publication. And it matters to me personally; I’ve spent the last 25 years writing about the need to take debt and spending seriously. The size of the state is inversely proportional to personal liberty in ways that are too often overlooked.

But the intense acceleration of the quest to aggregate power in the White House is now unambiguously the more immediate threat to liberty. It’s visible every day on my commute to work, as National Guardsmen linger in my D.C. Metro stop. It’s visible in the September gathering of the nation’s top military officials for something between a pep rally and a company retreat. It’s visible everywhere Immigration and Customs Enforcement is staging raids and setting up warrantless checkpoints. It’s visible in the administration’s moves to take a stake in Intel and broker a TikTok sale. It’s visible from space. (As I write this, Blue Origin is completing its 36th New Shepard flight—a bright spot in a dark month.)

The Cato Institute’s Gene Healy wrote the bible on the imperial presidency, tracing how voters of all stripes invest outsized hopes in presidents and then act shocked when presidents behave like tyrants. The durable lesson: Don’t confer powers on your team’s guy that you wouldn’t trust in the other team’s hands.

But it’s hard to break the habit of agglomerating authority when your party is in charge. This problem is cross-partisan and is older than Donald Trump—or Joe Biden, or even Richard Nixon. After Watergate, the nation briefly remembered why limits are good. But it wasn’t long before the White House started soaking up power again, and by the 2000s a cadre of executive-power enthusiasts, such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, started pushing hard to “restore” presidential prerogatives. The legal and scholarly scaffolding for today’s power grabs was assembled well before the last few months.

Meanwhile, the “national security” and “federal property protection” exceptions have become a tunnel wide enough to drive an armored personnel carrier through. In 2020, the Department of Homeland Security surged hundreds of federal officers into Portland, Oregon, with threadbare training for the job at hand; internal reviews later read like warnings from the future we’re now experiencing. Surveillance of protesters and mission creep were inevitable; they were the most predictable features of an overgrown executive. But despite that mess, the boots just keep hitting the ground. Portland is once more bracing for a federalized deployment—this time National Guard troops—with state and local officials fighting back on the grounds of both necessity and legality.

Immigration enforcement shows how this logic lands in daily life. The federal government claims sweeping authority within a 100-mile border zone that covers where nearly two-thirds of Americans live. That zone has long been a gray area for warrantless stops and checkpoints, ripe for masked agents far from any actual border to nick away at ordinary civil liberties. Powers granted today will be used more aggressively tomorrow. And powers used in that 100-mile border zone will soon be used elsewhere.

The emergency is now the default. Most of the knobs and levers a modern president uses to bully companies, police speech, or move bodies around aren’t new laws—they’re standby powers that switch on with a magic word: emergency. Congress littered the U.S. Code with these shortcuts; the Brennan Center for Justice has cataloged 137 statutory powers that spring to life the moment a president declares one. (Many never fully turn off.) As of mid-2025, there were roughly 50 simultaneous national emergencies still in force; they are renewed annually, spanning everything from sanctions to tariffs. That architecture lets the White House reach for trade controls, financial blockades, and tech blacklists without returning to Congress. If you like your powers separated, this is the opposite.

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Are Your Identification Photos in a Face Recognition Database?

A majority of Americans are in face recognition databases in use by the U.S. government. Are you one of them? The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched a new quiz called “Who Has Your Face” to help you find out.

“Your driver’s license picture and other ID photos are often shared with law enforcement and other agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),” said EFF Digital Strategist Jason Kelley. “Those agencies use facial recognition technology to compare your face with those in mugshots and with other photos of people suspected of committing crimes—putting you at risk of being misidentified. So we created this quiz to help show people what we know about who has their face.”

To create the Who Has Your Face quiz, EFF and the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law reviewed thousands of pages of public records to determine as much as possible which government photos of U.S. citizens, residents, and travelers are shared with which agencies for facial recognition purposes.

We learned that government agencies—including ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI—could all have some access to these photos. However, despite hundreds of hours of research it’s nearly impossible to know precisely which agencies are sharing which photos, and with whom. For example, each state DMV shares access to their photos differently, depending on agreements with local police, other states, and federal agencies.  Our Who Has Your Face quiz asks you questions like what kind of ID you have and which state you live in to help you narrow down which agencies might have copies of your photos.

“These public records have shown us that biometric database sharing is widespread and completely unregulated—and this is still just a partial picture,” said Clare Garvie, senior associate with the Center on Privacy & Technology. “Americans deserve to know how their biometric information is being used, especially when it may put them at risk of being misidentified as a criminal suspect.”

“Here’s the truth: it should be easy to learn the full list of which entities have personal data that you’ve been required to hand over in exchange for a driver’s license or for re-entry into the country after visiting family abroad—especially when that’s a photo of your face,” said EFF Surveillance Litigation Director Jennifer Lynch. “Most people realize that their photos are scanned into a database, but they don’t realize this effectively makes them part of a perpetual police line-up. That’s what’s happening to millions of people, without their knowledge, and it’s practically impossible to opt out.”

Despite the proliferation of federal, state, and local face databases, we can fight back. Laws that ban government use of face recognition are increasingly passing around the country. Several states already don’t allow or don’t have face recognition at DMVs. Cities like San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland, California, as well as Somerville, Massachusetts have also passed bans on its use.  To help ban government use of face recognition in your city, visit our About Face campaign.

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UK Expands Online Safety Act to Enforce Preemptive Censorship For “Priority” Offenses

The UK government is preparing to expand the reach of its already controversial censorship law, the Online Safety Act (OSA), with a new set of rules that push platforms toward preemptive censorship.

The changes would compel tech companies to block material before users can even see it, under the claim of stopping “cyberflashing” and content “encouraging or assisting serious self-harm.”

On October 21, the government laid before Parliament a Statutory Instrument titled The Online Safety Act 2023 (Priority Offences) (Amendment) Regulations 2025.

This legal mechanism, used to amend existing legislation without requiring a full new Act, adds two additional “priority offences” to Schedule 7 of the OSA:

By classifying these as “priority illegal content” under Section 59 of the OSA, the government triggers the law’s strictest obligations for online platforms.

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Seattle Jail Scandal: King County Hires Illegal Aliens as Guards, Vows to Fight State Law and Keep Them Employed

Seattle’s King County Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention (DAJD) has admitted to illegally hiring over three dozen migrants as corrections officers to guard American citizens in jail after being exposed by a whistleblower.

Instead of firing the violators, the Democrat-run county is vowing to fight the state ban and even push for legal changes to approve the hires retroactively.

The controversy began when a whistleblower filed a complaint with the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission (WSCJTC), alleging that DAJD hired as many as 100 individuals with expired or invalid visas, in direct violation of Revised Code of Washington (RCW) 43.101.095.

This law explicitly requires corrections officers to be U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, or DACA recipients, with no exceptions for illegal aliens.

On Thursday, the DAJD confirmed hiring 38 illegal aliens who were “incorrectly certified,” calling it a mere “oversight.” Just four recent recruits were dismissed from training following the probe.

“All are fully trained as corrections officers and authorized to work in the United States. King County is committed to safety and the fair treatment of these officers and continues to work closely with the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission (WSCJTC). We are keeping all available avenues of relief open at this time,” the DADJ said in a statement provided to The Jason Rantz Show.

Despite not being legally allowed to work as corrections officers, the DAJD said it will not terminate the rest of the aliens’ employment.

“To ensure the integrity of jail operations and the safety of our staff and those in our custody, most of the officers continue to work their assigned shifts while we have ongoing conversations with the CJTC about next steps,” the department added. “All officers who continue to perform duties have completed full training through the CJTC.”

The department is collaborating with the Washington State Attorney General’s Office to try to amend the law.

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Army Lieutenant Who Was Court-Martialed for Refusing COVID-19 Shot Granted Full Reinstatement and Retroactive Promotion After Under Secretary of War Steps In to Fix Slow Processing

The U.S. Army has officially granted full reinstatement to former First Lieutenant Mark Bashaw, retroactively promoted to Captain, after Under Secretary of War Anthony J. Tata personally intervened to address the “last mile” delays in the reinstatement process.

Under Secretary Tata announced the action on X, formerly Twitter:

“On Monday, @MCBashaw emailed me about several ‘last mile’ issues in the COVID reinstatement process. We immediately convened @USArmy leaders to address them. At this stage, any delays are unacceptable. We’re committed to reinstating our impacted warriors ASAP.”

He later added that the Army and Department of War were engaging directly with Kevin Bouren and Mark Bashaw to resolve any outstanding concerns, noting that not all corrective efforts are visible to the public, but they are “happening steadily behind the scenes.”

Retired U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer 2 and intelligence officer Sam Shoemate responded on Under Secretary Tata’s announcement, stating: “I spoke to [Bashaw]. You sure lit a fire under their ass to get him taken care of. The problem is that it shouldn’t take the Undersecretary of the DOW to get that done.

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Burma Army’s “Scorched Earth” Campaign Against Civilians Ahead of National Elections

Thick black smoke billows into the sky, twisting above the charred remains of what was once a thriving village. Flames consume wooden homes, their roofs collapsing as fire spreads relentlessly through the community. The air is heavy with the acrid scent of burning thatch and scorched earth, while displaced villagers watch helplessly from a distance, their lives reduced to ashes.

This scene of devastation followed a Burma Army airstrike on a civilian village in Arakan State on January 9, marking the start of another year of intensified fighting. After losing significant ground through February, the junta is now escalating attacks ahead of planned national elections, polls that exclude resistance-held territories and bar participation by pro-democracy parties. The regime’s objective is to recapture enough territory to present the election results to the international community as representing the will of the entire nation.

The attack in Arakan, like most strikes against civilians today, came without warning, sending families scrambling for cover as bombs rained down. Witnesses reported the deafening roar of jets overhead before the first explosion shattered the midday silence. Within minutes, homes, schools, and places of worship were engulfed in flames, leaving behind only smoldering ruins.

According to local reports, at least 42 civilians were killed and 50 others wounded, though the true death toll is believed to be much higher. Nearly 500 homes were reduced to rubble, forcing survivors to flee into nearby forests with whatever they could carry. The Burma Army has since cut off communication with the area, making it nearly impossible to assess the full extent of the destruction or deliver aid to those in desperate need.

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