Tag: police state

Carbon Neutral, Speech Negative: Amsterdam Bans Ads Featuring Meat & Fossil Fuels

In “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I write about how censorship often becomes an insatiable appetite once countries go down the road of speech regulation. There is no better example than the Dutch and their recent ban on public ads for meat and fossil fuels. Activists have imposed similar limitations on advertising for products in the United States, from alcohol to tobacco. However, the Dutch law reflects how this tendency can metastasize into shielding citizens from unhealthy choices or influences.

It appears that Dutch painters such as Pieter Aertsen (with his work A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms, above) were promoting harmful imagery in their work. As for Rembrandt’s “Slaughtered Ox,” the Dutch master is now little more than a climate change denier.

Starting on May 1, the ban on such images became part of Amsterdam’s push to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. While purportedly neutral on carbon, it is manifestly negative on free speech.

As with other anti-free speech measures in Europe, this push again came from the left. The GreenLeft Party’s Anneke Veenhoff explained “I mean, if you want to be leading in climate policies and you rent out your walls to exactly the opposite, then what are you doing?”

The answer is engaging in free speech.

This is, of course, commercial speech, which is often subject to a lower level of protection. However, this shows the danger of using the differential standard to target products or industries viewed as unhealthy or ill-advised for consumers.

In Amsterdam, the ban will cover industries such as airlines, including KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, one of the largest employers and revenue generators in the country.

Notably, activists compare this to cigarette advertising bans, confirming the very slippery slope danger that those companies raised when they were targeted.

Hannah Prins, a paralegal at Advocates for the Future, is quoted as saying, “I don’t think it’s normal to see murdered animals on billboards. So I think it’s very good that that’s going to change.”

Other Dutch cities are now following suit, including Haarlem, Utrecht, and Nijmegen.

Of course, prostitutes still advertise live in Amsterdam and marijuana is a major industry for tourists.

If you want drugs, there are ample choices.

However, if you want a steak, you will have to rely on word-of-mouth directions.

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EU Pushes Meta Toward Digital ID and Age Verification Under DSA, Threatens 6% Revenue Fine

Brussels has decided Meta isn’t monitoring its users hard enough.

The European Commission issued a preliminary finding on April 29 that Facebook and Instagram violate the Digital Services Act because the company can’t reliably stop children under 13 from creating accounts, opening Meta to fines that could reach 6 percent of its global annual turnover, a sum potentially north of $12 billion.

The official complaint is clearly a regulator demanding more identity checks, more verification, more friction at the door.

Meta’s existing approach, which mostly involves asking users to type in their birthday, lets minors lie their way onto the platform. The Commission says the tool available for reporting underage users requires up to seven clicks to access, is not pre-filled with user information, and frequently results in no follow-up action.

The Commission also pointed to evidence that around 10 to 12 per cent of children under 13 were accessing Instagram and/or Facebook, contradicting Meta’s own internal numbers.

What the Commission wants Meta to do instead carries a cost most of the coverage skipped over. Self-declared birthdays are inadequate, so something stronger has to fill the gap.

That means age estimation systems that infer how old you are from how you behave or age verification that links your account to a government-issued document. Either path turns the basic act of opening a social media account into either a behavioral surveillance event or an identity verification event. There is no third option being seriously proposed.

The implications reach well beyond the under-13 question. Once a platform knows who you are with legal certainty, the entire premise of online speech changes.

Anonymity has historically protected dissidents, whistleblowers, abuse survivors, journalists communicating with sources, and ordinary people who simply don’t want their employer reading their political opinions.

Strip that away and you lose the conditions under which a great deal of valuable speech actually happens. People self-censor when they know they are being watched and a verified internet is a watched internet by definition.

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There is Nothing Social About Your Social Contract: Why Coercion Can Never Create Harmony

From vaporizing schools abroad to shielding elite predators at home, the state relies entirely on violence. True prosperity begins the moment we stop funding our own destruction.

The concept of the “social contract” is perhaps the most successfully marketed lie in modern history, a phantom agreement you never signed that is violently enforced upon you from birth. To understand the sheer, unadulterated ruthlessness of the people who enforce this contract, you only have to look at how they initiate their geopolitical conflicts. On the very first day of the 2026 war with Iran, the United States military launched a “triple-tap” missile strike that vaporized the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, slaughtering over 150 innocent civilians—the vast majority of them young girls crushed under a collapsing roof. The state demands a monopoly on violence, extorting your wealth to fund these atrocities, all while promising to act as your ultimate protector.

When you strip away the patriotic pageantry and the political theater, you are left with a massive, parasitic entity that claims the right to mass murder children abroad while aggressively shielding the most heinous predators within its own ranks. Every time the political class initiates physical harm or steals your property to fund their empire, your quality of life is degraded. It is a mathematical certainty of human interaction that coercion breeds suffering, yet the masses are continuously conditioned to cheer for their own subjugation.

To understand the sheer psychosis required to maintain this centralized authority, one only needs to look at the unhinged escalation currently unfolding in the Middle East. Following the initial strikes, the executive branch dropped all pretense of measured diplomacy and openly threatened the complete eradication of millions more innocent lives. Following a dispute over the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, Trump issued a terrifyingly casual ultimatum, warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” if his economic demands were not met. This is not foreign policy; it is textbook terrorism broadcast from the world’s most heavily armed podium.

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EU Going To War With VPNs In Bid To “Save The Children”

Western European governments and EU bureaucrats are advancing tighter regulations on VPNs as part of a broader push for “online age verification” and their ‘Chat Control’ agenda.  Privacy advocates and digital rights groups warn that Europe is drifting towards a surveillance and censorship regime similar to internet restrictions and firewalls used by Russia and China.

Last week European Commission Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen suggested that Brussels may need to address the use of VPNs to bypass the EU’s upcoming age-verification systems.  Speaking during a press conference on the EU’s new digital age-verification app, Virkkunen acknowledged that users could circumvent the system with VPNs and stated that preventing such circumvention would be among the ‘next steps’ policymakers need to examine.

Her statements were delivered only two weeks after she shared a stage with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who called for a crackdown on web media companies to “protect children” from dangerous content.  The first stage of their agenda is a government created universal age verification app which web companies will be required to integrate.  Von der Leyen asserts that the new restrictions are designed to “defend children’s rights” (how does restricting access protect rights?).

The Orwellian language of the EU is not coincidental.  “Child vulnerability” is a carefully chosen vehicle to manipulate public approval, opening the door to incremental government management of online content and discourse. 

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Fears erupt over ‘tyrannical tool’ Washington DC is eyeing as it could control your spending

A new form of money being explored in Washington could reshape how Americans buy, sell and save, sparking warnings from lawmakers.

Known as a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), or ‘digital dollar,’ the form of money would be issued and regulated by the Federal Reserve. Formal discussion regarding CBDC intensified around 2020.

The debate on the US adopting the digital dollar has been reignited online after Congressman Eric Burlison deemed it ‘the most tyrannical tool you could put in Washington’s hands.’

‘Flip a switch, you can’t buy a firearm. Flip another, you can’t donate to your church. China built that system. We are NOT building it here,’ the Missouri representative posted on X on Tuesday. 

If the US government were to adopt CBDC, critics have warned that it could directly manage money flow, monitor transactions in real-time, instantly distribute payments and enforce targeted monetary policy. 

Potential capabilities include programming money for specific uses, reducing financial privacy, and potentially enforcing negative interest rates.

Many lawmakers have been pushing to block the Federal Reserve from creating a digital currency, trying to attach a ban to several major bills.

Most recently, they attempted to include it in legislation extending a key surveillance program. However, that effort fell through when Congress passed the measure without the digital currency restriction before an April 30 deadline. 

The House voted 235-191 to extend the spy program, known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

However, a group of Republican lawmakers had hoped to include an effort to block CBDC in the bill, but the Senate resisted.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune warned that any legislation including a ban on a digital currency would be ‘dead on arrival’ in the Senate, effectively killing the proposal. 

Instead, lawmakers approved a short-term extension to keep the surveillance program in place while the debate continues. 

Burlison responded to Thune’s comments on X, saying: ‘I don’t care what Thune thinks. 

‘A Central Bank Digital Currency is a threat to all of our rights and liberties. It must be banned.’

Rep Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, a member of the House Freedom Caucus who is a supporter of the ban, said in the press conference that most of his constituents ‘don’t want the government monitoring their bank accounts, telling them what they can buy, when they can buy it, and when they’re not allowed to buy.’

More than 130 countries are researching or launching CBDCs, with full usage in the Bahamas, Jamaica and Nigeria. 

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How a Bill Banning AI Companions for Kids Could Usher in Widespread ID Checks Online

Sen. Josh Hawley’s Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue (GUARD) Act advanced out of the Senate Judiciary committee last week. “A Trojan horse for universal online ID checks,” is how Jibran Ludwig of Fight for the Future described it.

The bill would require anyone using an AI chatbot to provide proof of identity and ban minors from interacting with many sorts of AI chatbots entirely.

Unlike some social media age verification bills, it would give parents no right to opt out of the rules the federal government sets on their kids’ technology use.

The GUARD Act is co-sponsored by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.), who—like Hawley—has long been a champ at moral panic around technology. (Cue: Bipartisan is just another word for really bad idea…)

And while some on the Senate Judiciary Committee expressed concerns about privacy or how this could actually backfire and harm minors, those senators still voted to advance the bill. It “easily passed in committee,” notes The Hill, despite some senators’ reservations:

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who voted yes, said there are concerns about “potential privacy and security risks” with the age-verification component, suggesting it may need to be “fine-tuned.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who supported various kids online safety bills, said he would vote yes but noted the bill needs “some revisions.”

Cruz was concerned the bill would completely ban all AI chatbots for minors, noting their potential benefits. Hawley clarified the bill does not ban all AI chatbots for minors, but rather it “prevents AI chatbots that engage with minors from pushing sexually explicit material to the minor,” or encouraging self-harm or suicide.

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EU Targets VPNs in EU Age Verification Push

Brussels has a problem with people trying to stay anonymous online and now it’s eyeing the tools they use to do it.

Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission’s Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security, and Democracy, told reporters that VPNs sit on the agenda as the EU pushes its age verification app toward member states.

Asked how Brussels intends to stop children from routing around age checks with a VPN, she said “it’s also an important part of next steps also to look at that it shouldn’t be circumvented.”

VPNs are more than a tool for teenagers trying to access Instagram. They are how journalists protect sources, how dissidents talk to family, how ordinary people stop their internet provider from logging every site they visit. Treating circumvention as a problem to be solved at the network level means treating privacy tools as the obstacle, rather than the proportionate response to a system that demands ID for ordinary online activity.

The VPN comment surfaced at a press conference about the Commission’s broader regulatory squeeze.

Brussels provisionally found that Meta likely violated the Digital Services Act by failing to keep under-13s off Facebook and Instagram, accusing the company of “failing to diligently identify, assess and mitigate the risks of minors under 13 years old accessing their services.”

By the Commission’s own count, roughly 12% of European children below the age limit log into the platforms anyway.

Virkkunen framed the finding as enforcement of existing rules rather than a new mandate. “The DSA requires platforms to enforce their own rules: terms and conditions should not be mere written statements, but rather the basis for concrete action to protect users, including children,” she said.

A Commission spokesperson echoed the line, telling ISMG that the DSA “does not mandate specific mitigation measures,” and pointing to alternatives like better internal review processes.

The denial sits awkwardly next to everything else Brussels is doing. The Commission published guidelines last July recommending age verification. It is now pressing member states to “accelerate the adoption of age verification tools.”

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The monetary system is designed to enslave you and your government

The dollar, pound, euro, peso, yen or whichever fiat, unbacked currency is in your wallet or bank account is the very means by which we are all enslaved.

It is a brilliant, hidden system of cunning, evil genius – to make the commodity most sought after the world over (because it is the most exchangeable for the things you want and need; the very thing that keeps the state getting more powerful, the corporations squeezing ever more small and independent businesses out of the market, the courts maintaining the unjust status quo and the media propagandising everyone using every trick in the book – all to keep the system in place and the rulers in power.

The best way to keep a population enslaved is to never let them see the bars of the cage and give them the illusion of freedom.

So you get a choice between red and blue political teams, different brands of the same poisonous crap, and different branded stores where the poisonous crap is sold, but that is not freedom; it’s a system developed over centuries so that its slaves become comfortable in their open air prison and even fight to maintain it, believing it’s the best system possible, or it wouldn’t exist and another would surely have taken its place by now.

Aren’t we just the most advanced civilisation there has ever been? I mean, look at our amazing buildings (and modern works of art)!

It Starts With Indoctrination At School

Do you never wonder why we are not taught about the most basic mechanisms of our economic life in school, if school is supposed to prepare us for the world ahead as an adult?

You might have been taught what a bank account was and how to open and use one and then they just implant the necessity of money in our minds and there it stays as we keep chasing the carrot and avoiding the stick for most of our working lives, without ever understanding where currency comes from and why it is so hard to accumulate enough to buy the things we need in life like a home, land, transport, etc.

Here is the shocking truth they will never tell you: the money we borrow when we go for a loan or a mortgage is not from someone else’s deposits, again, as most are taught, even at university level.

Fractional reserve banking would be bad enough, but what the actual mechanism is, as confirmed by the Bank of England’s ‘Money Creation in the Modern Economy’ report from 2014 and many other researchers before and since, is far worse than even starting with real labour-produced savings: the money is created when you sign for the loan.

If you didn’t know that before, it should indeed be shocking, but it’s not “conspiracy theory” or conjecture – The Bank of England says so.

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Utah first state to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs — law goes into effect, designed to prevent bypassing age checks

Utah’s Online Age Verification Amendments, formally Senate Bill 73, take effect on May 6, making the state the first in the U.S. to explicitly target VPN use as part of age verification legislation.

Signed by Governor Spencer Cox on March 19, the controversial law establishes that a user is considered to be accessing a website from Utah if they are physically located there, regardless of whether they use a VPN or proxy to mask their IP address. It also prohibits covered websites from sharing instructions on how to use a VPN to bypass age checks.

NordVPN has called the law an “unresolvable compliance paradox” and a “liability trap,” arguing that it holds websites responsible for identifying users whose tools are specifically designed to be unidentifiable. The EFF warned that the legal risk could push sites to either ban all known VPN IPs or mandate age verification for every visitor globally.

The law is also technically flawed, given that it assumes that a web provider can reliably detect VPN traffic and determine a user’s true physical location — they can’t. IP reputation databases such as MaxMind and IP2Proxy can flag traffic from known datacenter IP ranges, but commercial VPN providers rotate addresses constantly, and residential VPN endpoints are largely indistinguishable from standard home connections. Autonomous System Number analysis can catch traffic originating from datacenter networks, but can’t identify a personal WireGuard tunnel running on a cloud VPS, for example, which routes through the same infrastructure as ordinary web hosting.

The only detection method that reliably identifies VPN protocol signatures is deep packet inspection, which analyzes traffic at the network level, not system- or app-level. China’s Great Firewall and Russia’s TSPU system deploy DPI via ISPs, but a website operator can’t because it requires access to network infrastructure that sits between the user and the server, not on the server itself.

Meanwhile, setting up a personal WireGuard instance on any major cloud provider takes minutes, meaning the law will be more likely to negatively impact non-technical users who rely on commercial VPN services for legitimate privacy: journalists, people living under authoritarian regimes, political dissidents, and abuse survivors, among others.

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Anti-boycott laws run afoul of the free press

The First Amendment is under attack. The formidable frontal assault came quietly, stealthily into state legislatures across the nation. The attackers wielded pens proving mightier than swords and signed laws that punish the refusal to sign a pledge of allegiance — not the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States; rather, a pledge of deference to a foreign government and a promise not to boycott the nation that government represents.

What’s more American than a boycott, Alan Leveritt pondered when he spoke with Editor & Publisher during a vodcast with E&P Publisher Mike Blinder back in December 2021. Leveritt had penned a Nov. 22, 2021, op-ed for The New York Times about a legal case he’s been waging against an obscure Arkansas state law that suppresses free speech and requires people and businesses who contract with the state to sign away their rights to “boycott,” a subjective term.

Leveritt cited the Boston Tea Party and the centuries-old tradition of boycotts, using rhetoric and the power of the purse strings to influence people, companies and even government.

Leveritt comes from a family of Arkansas farmers. “We’re just white-trash farmers. I mean, that’s where we come from,” he explains in the new documentary film, “Boycott,” by Director Julia Bacha and the team at Just Vision, an award-winning production company.

Leveritt carries on that farming tradition today; in the film, he’s seen tending gardens and gathering eggs. But his day job — one that he’s held for nearly 50 years — is serving as publisher of the Arkansas Times, a free, local news source he co-founded in his 20s. Since the beginning, the venture has been entirely advertising-supported, and a significant amount of it comes from state agencies, including the state university system.

“I was raised conservative, and I started moving to the left over the years. As a recovering conservative, I want to be left alone, you know? Do your job. You get your business on merit, and you get paid for it, and you don’t pass some political litmus test. This is America,” he says in the film.

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