California Lawmakers Want a Wealth Tax to Soak the Rich for Living There. Also, for Leaving.

A pack of Democratic lawmakers in California are proposing a wealth tax for the state’s richest citizens, forcing them to pay more essentially just for owning a lot of stuff. They also, amazingly, want the tax to follow Californians who flee the state in response, attempting to make them continue paying taxes on wealth that’s not even in the state.

Assemblymember Rob Bonta (D–Oakland) is blunt about his reasons for introducing the California Wealth Tax (A.B. 2088). Rich people have money. He wants more of it to pay for and expand state services. And that’s it.

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Your child’s a no-show at virtual school? You may get a call from the state’s foster care agency

Massachusetts school officials have reported dozens of families to state social workers for possible neglect charges because of issues related to their children’s participation in remote learning classes during the pandemic shutdown in the spring, according to interviews with parents, advocates, and reviews of documents.

In most cases, lawyers and family advocates said, the referrals were made solely because students failed to log into class repeatedly. Most of the parents reported were mothers, and several did not have any previous involvement with social services.

The trend was most common in high-poverty, predominantly Black and Latino school districts in Worcester, Springfield, Haverhill, and Lynn; advocates and lawyers reported few, if any, cases from wealthier communities.

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The Reaction of the Left to Lockdown

That those countries which didn’t lockdown — such as Sweden and Japan — did absolutely fine (while New Zealand — a more isolated country on earth you cannot find — would have done fine, but chose instead to push 70,000 children into poverty). That the wealthiest people in the world become much, much richer, that we’ve taken a massive lurch towards a techno-dystopian world controlled by an ever shrinking cartel of IT companies and that lockdown has destroyed and will continue to destroy the lives of millions upon millions of poor people (the UN predicts a ‘biblical famine,’ possibly as many as 300,000 deaths a day), all for no good reason.

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Cops Arrest Man for Having “Their Feelings Hurt” by His Satire Police Facebook Page

In 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously agreed in Hustler v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46, that a parody, which no reasonable person expected to be true, was protected free speech. In the three decades since, politicians and government agencies have ignored this ruling and attempted to go after those who mock them using satire and parody.

Police officers are the worst when it comes to getting triggered after being made fun of with parody or satire accounts. As the following case illustrates, their rage at someone’s free speech can manifest into deprivation of rights, kidnapping, and extortion.

Michael Samuel Joseph Freemen runs a Facebook page under the name Borger Police Department. Aside from the content of the posts, the logo looks very similar to the actual Borger Police Department except that on the right on Freeman’s version, it clearly states that this is a “Satire / Parody” Facebook page.

The Borger Police Department claimed it wasn’t always labeled in this manner. However, it doesn’t matter as “no reasonable person expected it to be true.” What’s more, the censors at Facebook didn’t have a problem with it and our readers know how ban and censorship happy they can be.

Because many police officers do not like to have their feelings hurt, for running the page that is clearly labelled as satire, a warrant was issued for Freemen’s arrest.

He turned himself in last week on a charge listed as “ONLINE IMPERSONATION-NAME/PERSONA CREATE PAGE” which is an apparent reference to Sec. 33.07. of the Texas Penal Code forbidding creation of an online page with the “name or persona” of another person.

Spoiler alert, the Borger Police Department is not a person.

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