Tag: police state

Iowa Landowners Fight Seizure of Private Property for a Pipeline

A privately owned company is proposing a pipeline across five states. While some of the state governments appear to be on board, the project is facing backlash from a large and formidable population: property owners.

The pipeline, known as Summit Carbon Solutions, would span 2,500 miles and transport carbon dioxide (CO2) captured at 57 ethanol plants in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and the Dakotas to a permanent underground storage site in North Dakota. Construction of the $9 billion pipeline is expected to begin this year, with operations kicking off in 2026.

In June 2024, the project received regulatory approval from the Iowa Utilities Commission, despite landowner protests.

Julie Glade and her husband, Paul, are Iowans who oppose the project because of its use of eminent domain. Their property aligns with the proposed route, and in 2022 the couple was visited by a land agent. “The guy who came to our door wanted us to sit down and sign it without reading it,” Glade tells Reason. “They swooped in and tried to contact as many people as possible right away before the people knew what the consequences were. It’s very unethical.”

Several other landowners in the state share the Glades’ worries. During a hearing conducted by the Iowa Utility Commission, landowner Joan Gaul testified against the pipeline, which she said would cross a large portion of her farmland.

Gaul said Summit Carbon Solutions mailed two easements, which would give the pipeline a legal right to her land, to her without notice.

“This letter came telling us about taking our land using eminent domain. It was a difficult pill to swallow,” she said. Gaul said she didn’t accept the easements and has indicated that she will continue to fight the project.

The Glades visit the Iowa Capitol nearly every week to voice their opposition to the pipeline. They are joined by what the couple calls a diverse coalition united by their concern for the basic constitutional right to land ownership.

“We have MAGA Republicans and we have lefties. We put our differences aside and we work together,” she says.

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Mass immigration is being used to roll out the Globalists’ agenda, including digital IDs

The British Labour government is facing backlash after nearly 1,200 migrants crossed the English Channel in a single day, prompting ministers to propose linking immigration enforcement to a new digital ID system instead of delivering immediate border control reforms.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper unveiled plans to tie e-visas to digital IDs, allowing authorities to track people’s movements in and out of the UK and identify overstayers for enforcement.

Central to the initiative is the Gov.uk Wallet, a digital identity app launching this summer, which will consolidate state-issued credentials like driving licenses and veteran cards into a single platform by 2027.

Privacy advocates and commentators argue that the government is using the immigration crisis as cover to normalise a centralised surveillance infrastructure with long-term implications for civil liberties.

Previously, Heritage Party leader David Kurten had likened the digital ID push to the incremental expansion of covid-19 vaccine passports, warning that systems presented as voluntary often become essential for full participation in society.

The above is a summary of an article published by Natural News yesterday.  You can read the full article HERE.

Natural News was referring to a video Kurten shared last year.  He posted the video (below) on Twitter (now X) with the comment: “Digital danger: Digital ID is now being planned for 2025 by the UK government with its Data (Use and Access) Bill, for access to pubs, clubs, restaurants, shops, opening bank accounts and using government services. They can stick their Digital ID where the Sun doesn’t shine.”

At the time Kurten made this video, the Data (Use and Access) Bill was making its way through the House of Lords, where it originated. The Bill, introduced to Parliament on 23 October 2024, has now been passed by both the House of Lords and the House of Commons and is at the final stages – the Commons amendments are currently being considered – before it is passed onto King Charles for Royal Assent.

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Michigan Senate Dems Pass Bump Stock Ban, ‘Ghost Gun’ Regulations

Michigan Senate Democrats in the Judiciary Committee passed bills Thursday that will ban bump stocks and require serialization on so-called “ghost guns.”

WVNEWS reported that state Sen. Dayna Polehanki (D) sponsored SB 224, which is the bump stock ban.

Polehanki described bump stocks as “destructive weapons of war,” adding, “And let me be clear: these are not tools for sport or self-defense. Bump stocks are used to inflict maximum harm in seconds, and their continued availability puts every one of our communities at risk. That’s unacceptable, and it’s time for a change.”

The bills related to so-called “ghost guns” were sponsored by state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D). These pieces of legislation ban “the purchase, possession and distribution of firearms without valid serial numbers.”

McMorrow contended that gun control laws must change as quickly as does the technology to build guns, saying, “Just as rapidly as new weapon production methods emerge and evolve, so too must our laws and public safety efforts. Our communities deserve nothing less.”

More gun control, pushed by state Sen. Rosemary Bayer (D), would ban open and concealed carry on Michigan Capitol grounds and in the Anderson House Office Building.

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Former KPD officer gets 25-year prison sentence in pay-for-porn child materials case

Noting what he did was “appalling,” a federal judge Thursday sentenced a former Knoxville police officer to 25 years in prison for conspiring to get and receiving more than 40 sexually explicit images of a child starting when she was 6 years old.

Dan Roark, 48, will be 73 when he gets out of prison. After that, he faces the rest of his life on supervised released.

U.S. District Court Judge Katherine A. Crytzer accepted a specific sentencing agreement reached by defense attorneys and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Kolman that called for a punishment range of 262 months to 300 months.

Crytzer chose the top of the range, which amounts to 25 years. Roark cried quietly at one point during the sentencing hearing and declined a chance to speak on his own behalf.

He is represented by Gregory P. Isaacs and Ashlee Mathis of the Isaacs Law Firm.

Roark is seeking imprisonment at a federal facility in Kentucky.

Starting in 2019, Roark received explicit images of the Virginia child from her mother. Roark paid for images, the investigation showed.

Crytzer noted the investigation showed he got at least 41 pornographic images.

Roark, a KPD officer 16 years, disguised his identity to the mother, altering his name and claiming falsely that he was a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer, Kolman said.

To the child, he was “Daddy Dan,” Kolman said. He also listed a fake address in Knoxville from which he sent money to the mother in Virginia.

KPD fired Roark in 2023 after learning of the accusations against him.

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Southern Baptists target porn, sports betting, same-sex marriage and ‘willful childlessness’

Southern Baptists meeting this week in Dallas will be asked to approve resolutions calling for a legal ban on pornography and a reversal of the U.S. Supreme Court’s approval of same-sex marriage.

The proposed resolutions call for laws on gender, marriage and family based on what they say is the biblically stated order of divine creation. They also call for legislators to curtail sports betting and to support policies that promote childbearing.

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, is also expected to debate controversies within its own house during its annual meeting Tuesday and Wednesday — such as a proposed ban on churches with women pastors. There are also calls to defund the organization’s public policy arm, whose anti-abortion stance hasn’t extended to supporting criminal charges for women having abortions.

In a denomination where support for President Donald Trump is strong, there is little on the advance agenda referencing specific actions by Trump since taking office in January in areas such as tariffs, immigration or the pending budget bill containing cuts in taxes, food aid and Medicaid.

Remnants of the epic showdown in Dallas 40 years ago

Southern Baptists will be meeting on the 40th anniversary of another Dallas annual meeting. An epic showdown took place when a record-shattering 45,000 church representatives clashed in what became a decisive blow in the takeover of the convention — and its seminaries and other agencies — by a more conservative faction that was also aligned with the growing Christian conservative movement in presidential politics.

The 1985 showdown was “the hinge convention in terms of the old and the new in the SBC,” said Albert Mohler, who became a key agent in the denomination’s rightward shift as longtime president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

Attendance this week will likely be a fraction of 1985’s, but that meeting’s influence will be evident. Any debates will be among solidly conservative members.

Many of the proposed resolutions — on gambling, pornography, sex, gender and marriage — reflect long-standing positions of the convention, though they are especially pointed in their demands on the wider political world. They are proposed by the official Committee on Resolutions, whose recommendations typically get strong support.

A proposed resolution says legislators have a duty to “pass laws that reflect the truth of creation and natural law — about marriage, sex, human life, and family” and to oppose laws contradicting “what God has made plain through nature and Scripture.”

To some outside observers, such language is theocratic.

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How Palantir Is Expanding the Surveillance State

When people complain about Big Tech, they tend to mean companies like Meta, Google, and X—entities providing free tools and platforms that we can choose whether to use. Much less attention is directed at the tech companies helping the federal government consolidate and analyze data on all of us. Companies like the data analytics firm Palantir, created by Paypal co-founder and Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel.

Palantir has long been connected to government surveillance. It was founded in part with CIA money, it has served as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractor since 2011, and it’s been used for everything from local law enforcement to COVID-19 efforts. But the prominence of Palantir tools in federal agencies seems to be growing under President Trump. “The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon,” reports The New York Times, noting that this figure “does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.”

Palantir technology has largely been used by the military, the intelligence agencies, the immigration enforcers, and the police. But its uses could be expanding.

“Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies—the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service—about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions,” reports the Times.

Along with the Trump administration’s efforts to share more data across federal agencies, this signals that Palantir’s huge data analysis capabilities could wind up being wielded against all Americans.

This won’t allow the authorities watch us more so much as it helps them make use of all the data it’s already got on us. But that’s unsettling too.

“The ultimate concern is a panopticon of a single federal database with everything that the government knows about every single person in this country,” Cody Venzke, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Wired in April. “What we are seeing is likely the first step in creating that centralized dossier on everyone in this country.”

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Missouri Officials Will Begin Unannounced Marijuana Dispensary Visits For New Product Testing Initiative Next Month

State cannabis regulators will begin their first attempt next month to double check the work of licensed testing labs tasked with ensuring the safety of Missouri marijuana products.

Starting July 1, staff with the Division of Cannabis Regulation will arrive unannounced at dispensaries and collect about 50 products a month off the shelves. They’ll take them to the Missouri State Public Health Reference Laboratory to be tested for things like mold, pesticides and a whole range of other things.

Ryan Bernard, the division’s testing and research unit manager, said the unannounced sampling has been in the works for a while as a way to add an extra level of compliance. The division, Bernard said, isn’t expecting to find problems.

“We won’t know until we see the data,” Bernard said. “I have full faith and confidence in our testing licensees that they’re testing according to rule as it’s been outlined.”

However, national testing lab experts told The Independent that Missouri’s regulators might be shocked at the results.

“Shelf testing has not gone well in any state that I know of, especially if it’s just starting,” said Josh Swider, vice chair of the cannabis working group for American Council of Independent Laboratories. “It will be very telling very fast.”

Swider pointed to a citation in Arizona in April of a cannabis lab, where the state found more than a dozen alleged “deficiencies” including problems with the lab’s potency testing and pesticide and microbial detection methods.

Swider called the levels of pesticides on the Arizona products “sickening.”

“But this is what you’re seeing around the country,” said Swider, co-founder and CEO of Infinite Chemical Analysis Labs in San Diego. “Regulators are starting to enforce. They’re realizing an issue that’s been systemic for a long time.”

Other common issue Missouri regulars might also find, he said, are inflated levels of THC on products.

Regulators previously talked about conducting a “round robin” testing, where the state’s certified testing labs would double check each other’s work under the state’s instruction. Amy Moore, director of the Division of Cannabis Regulation (DCR), told lawmakers in 2023 that this additional testing rule was “critical.”

“The challenges in regulating and relying on for-profit cannabis testing labs,” Moore told lawmakers at a 2023 committee hearing, “is one of the most discussed challenges in the national cannabis regulatory community.”

However, the state never ended up getting the process going for a variety of factors, Bernard said, so the unannounced samples will be the regulators first attempt at a testing backstop.

Lawmakers began allocating money for this kind of sampling to be tested at the state laboratory in the fiscal year that began on July 1, 2024 with $3.8 million. Most of it went unspent because the cannabis testing methods were “still in the process of being implemented,” according to state budget documents. Another $2.4 million was allocated for this fiscal year ending on June 30, and it’s unclear how much of it has been spent.

Bernard couldn’t speak on the budget for testing, he said, because the division and state lab budgets are “totally separate.”

“Our operating budget is DCR only,” he said. “State public health labs is theirs.”

The lab will receive another $2.4 million for the fiscal year beginning July 1.

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Rhode Island Bills To Restrict Hemp THC Drinks Ignore Science And Current Regulations

As co-founder of Rhode Island’s only U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) organic hemp farm, and the largest outdoor cannabis farm in the state, I’ve spent the last eight years helping build the hemp industry from the ground up.

At Lovewell Farms, we’ve operated under one of the strictest regulatory frameworks in the country, subject to licensing, batch testing, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) limits, secure packaging requirements and product traceability. Yet two recently proposed bills, H6056 and H6270, would cut licensed hemp farms like ours out of the very market we helped establish.

These bills, introduced by Democratic Reps. Jacquelyn Baginski of Cranston and Scott Slater of Providence, aim to regulate the sale of hemp-derived beverages containing delta-9 THC, the compound most commonly associated with cannabis intoxication.

Slater’s bill would specifically eliminate the sale of such beverages and drink mix powders in Rhode Island, unless these products are specifically included in the state’s cannabis laws. The bills misrepresent both the science behind these products and the legal infrastructure already in place.

During a recent House hearing, Rep. Baginski stated, “I was surprised to learn that hemp-based THC products are also available in the marketplace and largely sold unregulated…at any establishment with a retail sales permit. That could be a convenience store, a hair salon, a gas station, anywhere.”

Respectfully, this is inaccurate. In Rhode Island, consumable hemp products must be produced by licensed handlers and tested by certified labs. They are subject to strict limits on THC content, comprehensive labeling standards, and age restrictions. If some products are being sold outside these rules, that’s a failure of enforcement, not evidence of an unregulated system.

Rep. Slater’s testimony in support of his bill, which would effectively ban all hemp-derived THC beverages unless sold through a dispensary, also included misleading claims. He asserted that “the hemp-derived THC products are now being sold outside the regulated cannabis system with minimal oversight, including limited testing, weak labeling, no seed-to-sale tracking as well as avoidance of cannabis taxes.”

This characterization erases the work of licensed hemp producers who follow every requirement the state imposes, many of whom, like us, already distribute specific products through dispensaries and operate with full compliance under existing cannabis laws.

Slater went on to say that allowing hemp beverages undermines Rhode Island’s cannabis cultivators, whom he described as his constituents. “I really find it unfair that as soon as this market has started that we’re trying to undermine them…and allowing folks that found kind of a loophole with this synthetically altered hemp in drinks…without going through the same framework that everyone else has.”

But our farm has always followed the framework. There is no loophole for us, just increasing restrictions on products we’ve made legally, safely and transparently for years.

Both bills ignore a crucial scientific fact: Not all hemp products are intoxicating.

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Catholics fight government surveillance in confession after wins against abortion mandate, tax

Catholic physicians and social service workers won over the Trump administration and Supreme Court, respectively, last week against their compelled participation in emergency room abortions and a state unemployment compensation program that costs more than their own church’s.

Bishops hope to make it a trifecta against a Washington state law that violates the seal of confession, threatening priests with imprisonment and fines if they don’t report suspected child abuse or neglect when “penitents” confess, but not lawyers who learn the same from clients.

Diocesan leaders filed a motion for preliminary injunction Thursday against Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson, Attorney General Nicholas Brown and county prosecutors in federal court in Tacoma to block SB 5375 at least 10 days before it takes effect July 27.

The Justice Department also quickly opened a civil rights investigation into the law as a prima facie First Amendment violation after Ferguson signed it, expanding the category of mandatory reporter to “member of the clergy,” defined as any regularly licensed, accredited or ordained minister, priest, rabbi, imam, elder, or similarly positioned religious or spiritual leader.

Denial of an injunction would likely fast-track the case to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and, if also rejected by the historically most liberal appeals court, to SCOTUS, which has rarely struggled to reach lopsided rulings upholding religious liberty.

The high court Thursday unanimously overturned the Wisconsin Supreme Court‘s ruling that found that a local Catholic Charities bureau’s work is primarily secular and hence it can’t get a religious exemption from paying into the state unemployment compensation system.

Justices unanimously ruled for Gerald Groff two years ago after the U.S. Postal Service threatened to fire the evangelical Christian for refusing to work Sundays under an Amazon delivery agreement, junking the “de minimis cost” standard that let employers easily deny religious exemptions but only appeared in a footnote in a 1977 ruling.

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Big Beautiful Bill hands AI industry free rein, strips local communities of power

The Big Beautiful Bill is making waves, and not in a good way. A provision tucked inside this massive legislative package would strip state and local governments of their ability to regulate artificial intelligence for the next decade. This isn’t just about tech policy. It’s about power, control, and the future of communities across America.

What’s really at stake?

Local governments have long played a crucial role in zoning decisions, ensuring that industrial developments don’t disrupt residential areas. But this bill would make it easier for corporations to secure zoning variances, allowing massive AI data centers to be built dangerously close to neighborhoods. These facilities require enormous amounts of electricity and water, often straining local infrastructure. Without local oversight, communities could be left powerless to push back against unwanted developments.

This isn’t hypothetical. It’s happening.

In one Congressional district, a proposed AI data center raised concerns among residents. The issue was resolved because local officials had leverage to negotiate terms. Under the Big Beautiful Bill, that leverage disappears. The ability of communities to decide where these centers will be built would be undermined, leaving decisions in the hands of corporations and federal regulators.

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