Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, has vetoed a bill that was meant to protect children from transgender gender-change surgeries and other procedures like giving kids cross-sex hormones.

House Bill 648, known as the “Stop Harming Our Kids Act,” was passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature along party lines in early June.

The bill sought to prohibit hormone treatments for minors as well as puberty-blocking drugs and gender reassignment surgery, such as giving girls who identify as boys double mastectomies, which critics have decried as a form of mutilation.

“If HB 648 doesn’t become law, we will be sending a horrible message to our children,” Louisiana state Sen. Jeremy Stine, a Republican, wrote on Twitter after the bill’s passage and as questions swirled around whether it would receive a veto.

“This isn’t complicated. Our kids deserve to know that they are loved, valued, and perfect just as God created them,” the Republican lawmaker added.

Stine’s fear that the bill would get nixed before it entered into force became a reality on June 29, when the Louisiana governor said in a letter (pdf) that he had vetoed it.

Some had held out hopes that Edwards wouldn’t veto HB 648 because in the prior legislative session, he decided not to block a law banning transgender-identifying athletes from taking part in women and girls’ sports competitions.

However, Edwards’ six-page veto letter made clear his opposition to the “Stop Harming Our Kids Act,” which he called “ironic” because he claimed “that is precisely what it does.”

‘Ripe For a Veto’

Edwards’ letter was addressed to Clay Schexnayder, the Republican Speaker of the Louisiana House of Representatives.

In it, Edwards said the bill threatens specialists’ professional licenses, removes parental rights in healthcare decisions for children with gender dysphoria, and generally amounts to a “targeted assault” on kids suffering psychologically from a “gender crisis.”

“The bill denies healthcare to a very small, unique, and vulnerable group of children,” he wrote. “It forces children currently stabilized on medication to treat a legitimate healthcare diagnosis to stop taking it.”

Edwards said that there was no evidence of any gender-change surgeries being performed in Louisiana between 2017 and 2021, and argued that supporters of the bill suggested it was “necessary to stop physicians from mutilating our children by performing gruesome sex change surgeries.”

“This is simply not happening in Louisiana,” he said, arguing that the bill sought to address a non-existent problem of sex reassignment surgeries in the state while in actual fact blocking access to “necessary” medication and other less invasive medical interventions for children suffering from gender dysphoria.

“I can even agree with that prohibition in this bill,” Edwards said of the bill’s provisions to ban transgender surgeries, while adding that, “unfortunately, that is not the intent of this bill and seemed to be included for dramatic effect to overshadow the medically appropriate use of puberty blockers and hormone replacements.”

Edwards also objected to a number of other “structural defects” in the bill that made it “ripe for a veto,” including insufficient clarity about what specific types of medical interventions would be subject to penalties or revocation of license.

With Edwards’ veto, the current regulations in Louisiana on transgender procedures for children remain unchanged. Specifically, they require that anyone under 18 is required to obtain parental consent before they can access hormone therapies, puberty blockers, and other treatments for gender dysphoria.

Gender dysphoria is generally defined as distress over gender identity that doesn’t match a person’s biological sex.

Pushback

Gender-reassignment “treatments” have become a prominent issue in state legislatures nationwide, as Democratic and Republican lawmakers advocate for bills that either advance or restrict such procedures.

At least 19 states have passed laws that shield minors from transgender surgeries and related procedures. Proponents of the procedures call them “gender-affirming care” while opponents consider gender dysphoria to be a psychological issue that need psychological solutions, with physical interventions being seen as mutilation of children’s changing bodies.

In recent years, leaders in the U.S. health care industry such as the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) have ramped up the promotion and use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and have even recommended gender transition surgeries for children.

Dr. Julia Mason, a member of the AAP, told The Epoch Times in a recent interview that the push in the United States for transgender medical interventions on minors is “primarily political” and linked to profit-making.

“The United States is becoming more of an outlier every day,” Mason said. “Every country that has taken a serious look at the evidence has concluded that medical transition of children is experimental, and the evidence doesn’t support doing it.”

Dr. Jeff Barke, a primary care physician in California’s Orange County and member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, told The Epoch Times in a recent interview that the recent surge in support for the transgender movement is political and contrived.

“It’s not science, it is politics,” he said. “Europe is moving toward freedom … while we are headed toward more socialism and totalitarianism.”

Barke said that performing gender transition surgery on minors is a “grotesque” form of child abuse that “should be illegal.”

Brad Jones contributed to this report.

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

President Joe Biden, the Biden grifting conglomerate, the Department of Justice, and the FBI under its fourth consecutive weaponized director, are in danger of subverting the American system of law.

They are in various ways undermining the tradition of self-reported income tax computation and voluntary compliance.

Our tax institutions, of course, are based on the real deterrence of a disinterested, uncompromised Internal Revenue Service. Without it, the income revenues of the United States are existentially threatened.

So far, any negative reputation of the IRS has rested with natural complaints that it is too zealous in hounding out American taxpayers in all walks of life. Or citizens often object that the IRS must enforce a tax code that is innately unfair.

But not until now, has the IRS itself ever been under a shadow of such corruption?

Has it been in the past ever found to have applied so blatantly and deliberately one standard of tax enforcement to elites and quite another to everyday Americans?

Again, if that charge of unequal treatment in tax compliance were to prove true, then Humpy-Dumpty like, the entire American system of revenue collection would shatter.

In other words, millions of Americans might shrug, “If Joe Biden, President of the United States and his criminally minded son, can get away with avoiding millions of dollars in taxes, then should not I, a nobody, at least have the right to avoid hundreds of dollars in taxes?”

So the Bidens, along with Attorney General Merrick Garland and the FBI, are treading on dangerous ground in imperiling a hallowed American tradition—one vital to the very governance and operation of the United States.

The current president of the United States, despite his monotonous calls for the well-off to “pay their fair share,” has likely deliberately connived to avoid taxes on sizable amounts of unreported taxable foreign income.

In the case of his son, “likely” is an unneeded adverb.

By Hunter Biden’s recent own admissions and corroborating evidence, he seems not only to have schemed to hide millions of dollars in foreign shake-down profiteering, but to have set up all sorts of paywalls, firewalls, and phony “loans” to ensure auditors would take years to unravel his illegal schemes—until well after the expiration of the statute of limitations. And his criminality succeeded so well that he has permanently gotten off not paying thousands of dollars in overdue taxes.

Joe Biden has serially lied that he did not know anything of his son’s business dealings.

That assertion is contrary to photographic evidence of him with Hunter Biden’s business associates, sworn statements from at least one of Hunter Biden’s former business partners, clear evidence from Hunter’s own laptop, and now recent disclosures from FBI documents and whistleblower testimonies. And yet the President continues to lie, and the media continues to shrug that dads often do such things.

It is almost beyond belief, but increasingly likely, that Hunter Biden in the past conducted his illicit business over the phone in the presence, and with the complicity, of current president Joe Biden himself. And the full trove of evidence is still trickling in.

This sordid scenario is part of the larger Biden criminal landscape. Joe and Hunter may well have received $10 million from Chinese consortia for doing nothing other than monetizing Joe Biden’s Vice-Presidency and his apparent then trajectory to the presidency.

There is no longer any doubt that Hunter Biden received fabulous amounts of money from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. That lucre was again based on nothing other than the willingness of his own father, now the current president, to be directed to where and how to employ his own purchased influence.

Accordingly, Joe Biden is on record boasting of his own power to fire a Ukrainian prosecutor—through personal threats of withholding congressional approved U.S. foreign aid to Ukraine.

Biden was furious that Ukrainian auditors were probing too deeply into matters that now are increasingly clear to have been central to his own family’s nefarious influence peddling.

Note well: the U.S. House of Representatives impeached a former president on two grounds: one, an allegation that Donald Trump used his office to threaten to delay (not to cancel) Ukrainian military aid; and, two, that he did so to harm a potential political rival in the next election.

Joe Biden has now trumped Trump on both counts.

One, he is involved in criminal enterprises with his entire family, whose shake-down payouts from Ukrainian moneyed interests depended on precisely the current President’s past willingness to use his then vice-presidential office to strongarm Ukrainian officials.

Two, Biden did not so much just seek to uncover wrongdoing by his likely presidential rival, as have him indicted by his own justice department for alleged violations of presidential records statutes.

Yet unauthorized removal of classified government records is a crime that Biden himself by his own admission also has committed—and for far longer a time, and perhaps involving far greater volumes of archival material.

Critics of the Bidens have long been puzzled about the opulent spending habits and costly acquisitions of Joe and Jill Biden, Hunter Biden, Jim Biden, and other lesser family satellites on the clan’s dole.

Such wonderment about the abyss between lifestyles led and taxes reported apparently reached the highest echelons of the IRS. Its special investigating teams recommended numerous felony indictments of Hunter Biden for conspiratorial tax fraud. It requested in vain to extend their investigations to Joe Biden himself.

We now also have good reason to believe that Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, both himself and through his subordinates, used their powers unlawfully to sidetrack Justice Department attorneys from legitimately and fully investigating Joe Biden, and/or to delay and obfuscate the full prosecution of Hunter Biden.

The result is that Hunter Biden successfully used his family influence to escape taxes on hundreds of thousands of dollars of disguised income through manipulating statute-of-limitations laws.

For years, he has also escaped paying taxes, by phony claims of loans, on other known millions of dollars in income that were still likely only a portion of all his foreign quid pro quo revenue schemes.

Note, however, the greatest damage the Bidens have done to this nation.

Joe Biden’s own past lucrative financial dealings with suspect Chinese interests, with connections to the ruling Chinese communist party, cast a shadow over current American foreign policy itself.

The American people are bewildered over why the Biden administration is appeasing the Chinese government. It keeps insisting, contrary to evidence, that bilateral relations are in great shape—after successful and unapologetic Chinese overt espionage efforts to send a spy balloon across sensitive areas of the United States.

China has defiantly stonewalled any request to explain how and why a porous Chinese virology lab incompetently let escape a gain-of-function virus, a virtual bioweapon, that killed over a million Americans and sickened over 300 million.

Its jets now play chicken with our own in the skies above the South China Sea. And its ships do the same with our vessels in the same environs.

It threatens to escalate to nuclear weapons if the United States should protect its de facto ally Taiwan from envisioned Chinese aggression.

All the above is in addition to years of Chinese copyright infringement, patent violations, manipulation of Chinese currency, trade dumping, and systematic espionage operations throughout sensitive areas of the U.S. military and general economy.

Again, Biden’s response is increasingly to downplay these mounting aggressions in direct proportion to their increased frequency.

The “why” of that bizarre exculpation raises the question of how exactly would it be possible so dramatically to influence, or “get to” a U.S. President. The answer may be buried in thousands of suppressed government documents and the data of now cancelled investigations.

Note again: America in vain recently spent $40 million and 22-months on a special prosecutor to pursue, on no evidence (but relying on plenty of disinformation, fraud, and criminality) the smear that Donald Trump was a Russian puppet, and his (demonstrably tough) treatment of the Russians was supposed proof of his collusion with Vladimir Putin.

In sum, every American now knows that he would have gone to prison for several years for even attempting, much less getting away with, the fraudulent tax avoidance schemes of Hunter Biden, who likely will never spend a single day in jail.

The IRS does not give passes for divots. The law treats the attempt or preempted scheme to violate it, almost as severely as the actuality of successfully breaking tax laws.

Again, all this will not, cannot, must not stand.

We can no longer have a United States if its President almost weekly demonstrably lies with impunity about his  relationships with the Biden family’s nefarious foreign business interests.

You can no longer have an American nation, if the son of the President of the United States successfully connives to rake in millions for his extended family by selling his father’s influence to foreign governments—a gambit that may currently affect the foreign policy of the United States. Adding insult to injury, Hunter Biden is now a White House fixture, as if the closer he clings to the nexus of American power and influence, the more likely he will continue to be exempted from American law.

There is no such thing as the America we once knew if the Bidens and their surrogates with impunity used the levers of the FBI and the Department of Justice to cover up, and escape prosecution of, crimes that would otherwise have sent any citizen under such liability to prison for several years.

This unfolding Biden melodrama has the potential to destroy the current presidency.

It will tarnish for generations the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the IRS.

And yet it will not die because the U.S. itself will not die, and so the scandal eventually will convict Joe, Hunter, and Jim Biden of serious felonies.

Finally, unless radical changes occur, the unapologetic Biden nefariousness will discredit permanently an obsequious and biased media that knowingly chose not to report on what they equally knew were historic transgressions against their United States.

According to the International Energy Agency, the transportation sector is more reliant on fossil fuels than any other sector in the economy. In 2021, it accounted for 37% of all CO2 emissions from end‐use sectors.

To gain insights into how different vehicle types contribute to these emissions, Visual Capitalist’s Selin Oguz and Sam Parker created the inforgapohic below to visualize the life cycle emissions of battery electric, hybrid, and internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles using Polestar and Rivian’s Pathway Report.

Production to Disposal: Emissions at Each Stage

Life cycle emissions are the total amount of greenhouse gases emitted throughout a product’s existence, including its production, use, and disposal.

To compare these emissions effectively, a standardized unit called metric tons of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e) is used, which accounts for different types of greenhouse gases and their global warming potential.

Here is an overview of the 2021 life cycle emissions of medium-sized electric, hybrid and ICE vehicles in each stage of their life cycles, using tCO2e. These numbers consider a use phase of 16 years and a distance of 240,000 km.

While it may not be surprising that battery electric vehicles (BEVs) have the lowest life cycle emissions of the three vehicle segments, we can also take some other insights from the data that may not be as obvious at first.

1. The production emissions for BEVs are approximately 40% higher than those of hybrid and ICE vehicles. According to a McKinsey & Company study, this high emission intensity can be attributed to the extraction and refining of raw materials like lithium, cobalt, and nickel that are needed for batteries, as well as the energy-intensive manufacturing process of BEVs.

2. Electricity production is by far the most emission-intensive stage in a BEVs life cycle. Decarbonizing the electricity sector by implementing renewable and nuclear energy sources can significantly reduce these vehicles’ use phase emissions.

3. By recycling materials and components in their end-of-life stages, all vehicle segments can offset a portion of their earlier life cycle emissions.

Accelerating the Transition to Electric Mobility

As we move toward a carbon-neutral economy, battery electric vehicles can play an important role in reducing global CO2 emissions.

Despite their lack of tailpipe emissions, however, it’s good to note that many stages of a BEV’s life cycle are still quite emission-intensive, specifically when it comes to manufacturing and electricity production.

Advancing the sustainability of battery production and fostering the adoption of clean energy sources can, therefore, aid in lowering the emissions of BEVs even further, leading to increased environmental stewardship in the transportation sector.

Via The Brownstone Institute,

Keeping up with the corruption of the Covid regime feels like drinking from a firehose. The volume of the fraud, the pace of new discoveries, and the breadth of the operations are overwhelming. This makes it imperative for groups like Brownstone Institute to digest the onslaught of information and communicate salient themes and dispositive facts, particularly given the dereliction of mainstream media.

On Monday, the House Judiciary Committee released a report on how the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) “colluded with Big Tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor Americans,” adding to the informational firehose we work to imbibe. 

The 36-page report raises three familiar issues: first, government actors worked with third parties to overturn the First Amendment; second, censors prioritized political narratives over truthfulness; and third, an unaccountable bureaucracy hijacked American society. 

1. CISA’s Collusion to Overturn the First Amendment

The House Report reveals that CISA, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, worked with social media platforms to censor posts it considered dis-, mis-, or malinformation. Brian Scully, the head of CISA’s censorship team, conceded that this process, known as “switchboarding,” would “trigger content moderation.”

Additionally, CISA funded the nonprofit EI-ISAC in 2020 to bolster its censorship operations. EI-ISAC worked to report and track “misinformation across all channels and platforms.” In launching the nonprofit, the government boasted that it “leverage[d] DHS CISA’s relationship with social media organizations to ensure priority treatment of misinformation reports.” 

The switchboard programs directly contradict sworn testimony from CISA Director Jen Easterly. “We don’t censor anything… we don’t flag anything to social media organizations at all,” Esterly told Congress in March. “We don’t do any censorship.” Her statement was more than a lie; it omitted the institutionalization of the practice she denied. The agency’s initiatives relied on a collusive apparatus of private-public partnerships designed to suppress unapproved information. 

This should sound familiar.

Alex Berenson gained access to thousands of Twitter communications that uncovered concrete evidence that government actors – including White House Covid Advisor Andy Slavitt – worked to censor him for criticizing Biden’s Covid policies.

White House Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty privately lobbied social media groups to remove a video of Tucker Carlson reporting the link between Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine and blood clots.

Facebook worked with the CDC to censor posts related to the Covid “lab-leak” hypothesis. Company employees later met with the Department of Health and Human Services to de-platform the “disinformation dozen,” a group including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

These were not cherry-picked examples – they were part of an institutional collusion to strip Americans of their First Amendment rights. Journalists Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi exposed the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” a collection of the world’s most powerful government agencies, NGOs, and private corporations that worked together to silence dissent. 

The Supreme Court has held that it is “axiomatic” that the government cannot “induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” Yet, CISA has joined the disturbing tendency of public-private partnerships designed to impede Americans’ right to information and freedom of speech. 

2. Political Operatives

Second, these programs were not idealistic attempts to promote the truth; they were calculated programs designed to quash inconvenient but truthful narratives.

The report outlines how CISA censored “malinformation – truthful information that, according to the government, may carry the potential to mislead.” Journalist Lee Fang later wrote that the malinformation campaign “highlights not only the broad authority that the federal government has to shape the political content available to the public, but also the toolkit that it relies upon to limit scrutiny in the regulation of speech.” 

In this system, uncensored information has a tacit government approval, amounting to a system of widespread propaganda.

“State and local election officials used the CISA-funded EI-ISAC in an effort to silence criticism and political dissent,” the report notes. “For example, in August 2022, a Loudon County, Virginia, government official reported a Tweet featuring an unedited video of a county official ‘because it was posted as part of a larger campaign to discredit the word of’ that official. The Loudon County official’s remark that the account she flagged ‘is connected to Parents Against Critical Race Theory’ reveals that her ‘misinformation report’ was nothing more than a politically motivated censorship attempt.”

The officials supporting the operation remained unrepentant in their aim to advance political agendas. Dr. Kate Starbird, a member of CISA’s “Misinformation & Disinformation” subcommittee, lamented that many Americans seem to “accept malinformation as ‘speech’ and within democratic norms.” 

Of course, the program explicitly violated the Constitution. The First Amendment does not discriminate based on the veracity of a statement. “Some false statements are inevitable if there is to be an open and vigorous expression of views in public and private conversation,” the Supreme Court’s controlling opinion held in United States v. Alvarez. But CISA – led by zealots like Dr. Starbird – appointed themselves the arbiters of truth and worked with the most powerful information companies in the world to purge dissent. 

This was part of a larger political campaign. 

Hunter Biden’s laptop, natural immunity, the lab-leak theory, and side effects of the vaccine were all censored at the government’s behest. The truth of the reports were not at issue; instead, they presented inconvenient narratives for Washington’s political class, who then used the Orwellian label of “malinformation” to lend cover to eviscerating the First Amendment. 

3. The Terror of the Administrative State

Third, the report exposes the increasing power of the administrative state. Federal bureaucrats rely on anonymity and unaccountability. Private industry employees could never oversee a disaster like the Covid response and maintain their jobs. It’d be like if BP’s head of safety for the Gulf of Mexico received a promotion after the oil spill. 

But unelected officilals like CISA officials enjoy ever-increasing power over Americans’ lives without having to answer for their calamities. Suzanne Spaulding, a member of the Misinformation & Disinformation Subcommittee, warned that it was “only a matter of time before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work.” 

Spaulding’s comment reflects the power that CISA wields and the benefit it derives from its lack of public exposure. Most Americans have never heard of CISA despite its overwhelming influence over lockdowns. 

In March 2020, CISA divided the American workforce into categories of “essential” and “nonessential.” Within hours, California became the first state to issue a “stay at home” edict. This began a previously unimaginable assault on Americans’ civil liberties. 

The House Report indicates that CISA was a central actor in censoring criticism of the Covid regime in the ensuing months and years. The agency is representative of the cabal of censorial and unaccountable officials engaged in public-private partnerships designed to keep us in the dark.

Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times,

Frustrated by what they call a lack of representation, some residents of El Dorado County, east of Sacramento, are exploring a plan to split from the Golden State and form their own state.

If enough residents support the idea, the Republic for El Dorado State group will take the matter directly to Congress, bypassing the state Legislature that has squashed numerous past attempts.

“We’re trying to find a way for it to happen without having to go to California on our knees, begging for them to release us. Because we know they will not,” one of the organizers, Sharon Durst, told The Epoch Times.

The county encompasses about 1,800 square miles along the Sierra Nevada and includes South Lake Tahoe, Placerville, Pollock Pines, Fallen Leaf, Meeks Bay and many other small towns and villages.

Today, the rural county of less than 200,000 people attracts tourists to its wine country and recreational offerings.

(Google Maps/Screenshot via The Epoch Times)

According to the website for the group, “The residents of El Dorado County have no local state or congressional representation. None of the state or federal representatives that serve El Dorado County, live in El Dorado County.”

They also say the “invasion” at the state’s border, sanctuary policies, and rampant crime violate the county’s rights.

The group has only officially met once in May but are planning to hold another town hall July 10.

If allowed to secede, El Dorado State could create its own constitution and a style of living that the locals want, according to Durst.

Their interpretation of California’s Constitution guarantees them a republican form of government, meaning their voice should be represented—but this isn’t happening, Durst said. For example, their state senator in District 4, which stretches across 13 counties, Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil (D-Jackson), represents around 1 million residents.

The group also argues they are guaranteed to have Congress help them with foreign invasions and domestic violence, both of which are rampant in the state with the influx of undocumented immigrants and skyrocketing crime, Durst said.

“Right now, people are leaving California, but we don’t want to leave our homes, we don’t want to leave what we’ve built. We just want to leave California,” she said.

People carry skis as they walk towards a resort in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., on March 21, 2023. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Making Economic Sense

Former county supervisor Ray Nutting, who was arrested in 2013 and later acquitted of charges related to receiving state grants, is helping to organize the economics side of the plan.

“We have an economic base that is renewable in terms of agriculture, tourism, and water supply,” he told The Epoch Times.

“We are very blessed in terms of who we are in El Dorado County, and our tax base absolutely will be enough to deliver critical services.”

He sees taxes going down for residents if they split from California. The state’s income, sales, and gas taxes are some of the highest in the nation. Those are on top of assorted fees for electricity usage, businesses, climate action, and many other fees and charges.

A recent increase in the state’s housing regulations and mandates requiring low-income housing and high-density developments are also expensive, Nutting said.

Nutting’s children are fifth-generation ranchers, and he has taught them to care for the land, he said.

“We have a chance to take care of the land better than the state of California,” Nutting said.

The proposed secession would hinge on Article 4, section 3, clause 1, which provides the process of forming new states. This article—sometimes called the Admissions Clause—declares no state can be formed within the jurisdiction of any other state without the consent of the Legislatures of the states and Congress.

This is sometimes called the “Admissions Clause,” but Durst calls it the “Hostage Clause,” because it holds the people who are unhappy with their current situation hostage, she said.

Traffic flows along Highway 50 in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., on Sept. 5, 2021. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group via AP)

The second clause—Article 4, section 3, clause 2—states that Congress shall have the power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States.

The group points to the fact that 46 percent of the land in El Dorado County is federal forest land, and the county was formed before the state. Nutting said he believes the county could use this clause to go straight to Congress, although he said they will have to obtain expert legal advice at some point.

Law Professor Disagrees

Margaret Russell, a law professor at Santa Clara University and constitutional law expert, said this language does not allow counties to go directly to Congress.

“I think this is a non-starter of an argument for them,” Russell told The Epoch Times.

There’s no such thing as a county in the constitutional structure, she added. “They derive their power from the state.”

The U.S. Constitution doesn’t say anything about the role of counties and makes it clear the state is the relevant stakeholder, she said.

As for representation, the state mirrors the structure of Congress. This allows representation based on population and representation in the Senate based on equalizing power across the government, according to Russell.

Pioneering Spirit

The group is circulating a survey to find out how many of their neighbors support the idea. So far, they have received positive feedback and few negative comments, according to Durst. They expect to take about a year to organize what they need to petition Congress, she said.

“So many of these ‘separate from California‘ movements linger on and on, and we don’t want to do that,” Durst said. “We want to know fairly quickly, do the people of [El Dorado County] see an advantage to leaving California as a new state.”

Bill Roberts holds an American flag in front of his house in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., on Aug. 31, 2021. (Terry Chea/AP Photo)

The group’s trailblazing spirit is reminiscent of the efforts made by forefathers of the region, who came out west seeking riches during the Gold Rush of the late 1840s and early 1850s, she said.

“We still have that pioneer spirit in El Dorado County,” Durst said.

Her great-great grandmother arrived in the county in a covered wagon, she said. Durst was born just west of the area in Sutter County and moved back after she retired from her job in Sacramento.

The secession isn’t about politics—Durst isn’t a Republican or a Democrat. The state has always been too big, she said.

“The Declaration [of Independence] gave us freedom and liberty from King George, and we want freedom and liberty from the state of California,” Durst said.

Talk of splitting up the Golden State has been floated many times before this, reaching back to when the territory first became a state in 1850. At least 220 attempts to break up the nation’s third-largest state have failed, according to the California State Library.

Residents of a cluster of rural northern California and southern Oregon counties have repeatedly attempted to form a “State of Jefferson” due to concerns over logging, mining, and agricultural industries. In 2013, two northern California counties—Siskiyou and Modoc—voted in favor of beginning plans to secede and create the State of Jefferson.

In the 1990s, the late California Assemblyman Stan Statham, a Republican from Redding, advocated for dividing California into three states.

A new hate speech bill passed by the Michigan House of Representatives, HB 4474, would criminalize causing someone to feel threatened by words – including misusing someone’s desired pronouns.

Under HR 4474, hate crime penalties would apply for causing someone to “

If convicted, offenders could face up to five years in prison for such a felony, or a fine of up to $10,000.

According to the bill, “intimidate” is defined as “a willful course of conduct involving repeated or continuing harassment of another individual that would cause a reasonable individual to feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened, and that actually causes the victim to feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened.”

The bill also considers “sexual orientation” and “gender identity expression” as a protected class.

Gender identity expression, according to the language of the bill, “means having or being perceived as having a gender-related self-identity or expression whether or not associated with an individual’s assigned sex at birth.”

Critics say it’s absurd

“The state of Michigan is now explicitly allowing the gender delusion issue to be used as a ‘protected class.’ This opens up numerous issues when it comes to the courts and the continued weaponization of the system against conservatives,” said State Rep. Angela Rigas, adding “We saw similar concerns when they wanted to pass blocks on ‘conversion’ therapy. It seems Dems want to be in the business of telling people how to think.”

The bill, passed by a 59-50 vote in the Democrat-controlled House, now moves to the state Senate for consideration. If passed, it will move to the desk of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who is expected to sign it.

By Charlie Zhu and Helen Sun, Bloomberg Markets Live reporter and analysts

1. A rising number of economists are calling for more borrowing by the central government to shore up the economy. Given mounting debt levels at households, corporates and local authorities, it’s appropriate for the Ministry of Finance to issue more notes and support infrastructure investment, they say.

China can sell long-term construction sovereign bonds, said Luo Zhiheng, chief economist at Yuekai Securities Co. This will help offset inadequate domestic demand, and at the same time ensure there are enough fiscal funds to support lower-income parts of the population, according to a report.

He joined Citic Securities Co.’s Ming Ming, who in May pointed to higher central government borrowing as one of three areas that can achieve policy breakthroughs this year. Its leverage ratio was 21.4% at end-2022, lower than that of local governments and many major economies, Ming wrote in a note at the time.

Deleveraging over the past few years has hit the private sector — the most vibrant part of the economy — hard, Xu Gao, chief economist at Bank of China International Ltd., wrote in a note. China’s growth has been in a downtrend over the last few years, shattering market confidence, so it’s necessary to steer the economy back onto the right track, he said.

2. Policy constraints seem to be the reason why Beijing delayed announcing a forceful stimulus package. A high debt level is one of the factors that limit China’s options, said Zhu Min, a former IMF deputy managing director. Jin Keyu, economics professor at LSE, said even a stimulus plan in the trillions of yuan may only have a moderate impact on the economy.

While the People’s Bank of China cut policy rates in June, further lowering the interest rates won’t effectively do much to reduce household savings or boost corporate investments, Sheng Songcheng, former head of the statistics and analysis department at the central bank, wrote in an article on China Business News. China needs more innovative measures and reforms to boost market confidence, he said.

3. Investors have become impatient waiting for effective measures. While the government is poised to boost consumption and hence help the economic recovery, the Shanghai Composite Index of shares dropped below the 200-day moving average to a five-month low.

The yuan accelerated its decline toward the low in the fourth quarter last year, even though the central bank repeatedly used the daily reference rate to slow depreciation. The currency also fell to levels not seen since early 2021 against its peers..

The yield on the one-year sovereign note, a barometer of liquidity in the financial system, capped the biggest quarterly fall since the pandemic began, signaling credit demand is faltering.

When the creators of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Google’s Bard want to ‘teach’ them about the world in order to accurately answer questions, they use various news and social media sources to ‘scrape’ content which then ‘trains’ said models. This is why Twitter owner Elon Musk just began throttling accounts which consume a massive amount of content on a daily basis – as it became a free and valuable resource for engineers.

It’s also why AI can be ‘woke’ – as it all depends on the data it’s being trained on, which as we’ve seen, can bias the chatbot towards the political ideology of its creators (for which loopholes were quickly discovered).

Now, the Financial Times reports that the world’s largest tech companies are negotiation with major media outlets to strike landmark deals for the use of news content to train AI chatbots.

These people said that publishers including News Corp, Axel Springer, The New York Times and The Guardian have each been in discussions with at least one of the tech companies.

Those involved in the discussions, which remain in the early stages, added that the deals could involve media organisations being paid a subscription-style fee for their content in order to develop the technology underpinning chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.

The talks come as media groups express concern over the threat to the industry posed by the rise of AI, as well as fears over the use of their content by OpenAI and Google without deals in place. Some companies such as Stability AI and OpenAI are facing legal action from artists, photo agencies and coders, who allege contractual and copyright infringement. -FT

According to News Corp CEO Robert Thomson, the media industry’s “collective IP is under threat,” for which news outlets should “argue vociferously for compensation.”

In short – use their content to train your AI without paying, get sued.

Current discussions have revolved around a pricing model in the $5 million to $20 million per year level, according to one industry exec.

According to Thomson, AI was “designed so the reader will never visit a journalism website, thus fatally undermining that journalism.”

The negotiations, if successful, would establish a blueprint for news organizations dealing with generative AI companies worldwide.

“Copyright is a crucial issue for all publishers,” said the FT, which is also in negotiations over the matter. “As a subscriptions business, we need to protect the value of our journalism and our business model. Engaging in constructive dialogue with the relevant companies, as we are, is the best way to achieve that.”

According to the report, media industry executives want to avoid the pitfalls of the early internet, when they undermined their own business models by giving away so much news for free, while Big Tech companies such as Google and Facebook then accessed that information to grow their multibillion-dollar advertising platforms.

Google recently announced an AI search option, which provides users with an information box above its traditional list of web links. The company has been leading the negotiations with UK news outlets, Guardian and NewsUK – two of many such outlets that parent company Alphabet has existing relationships with.

According to Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Politico-owned Axel Springer, the industry should create a “quantitative” model similar to that used by the music industry to allow nightclubs and streaming services to pay record labels each time a track is played. This would require AI companies to agree to disclose internal metrics on media content usage, which they don’t currently do.

“We need an industry-wide solution,” said Döpfner, adding “We have to work together on this.”

Döpfner, whose Berlin-based media company also owns the German tabloid Bild and the broadsheet Die Welt, said an annual agreement for unlimited use of a media company’s content would be a “second best option”, because that model would be harder for small regional or local news outlets to take advantage of. -FT

“Google has put a licensing deal on the table,” said one executive at a newspaper group. “They have accepted the principle that there needs to be payment . . . but we have not got to the point of talking zeros. They have acknowledged that there is a money conversation that we need to have over the next few months, which is the first step.”

That said, Google called the report over a potential licensing deal ‘not accurate,’ adding that it’s “very early days and we’re continuing to work with the ecosystem, including news publishers, to get their input.”

According to Google, they’re in “ongoing conversations” with news outlets, both large and small, in the US, UK and Europe, while it’s Bard AI is being trained on “publicly available information,” which could include paywalled websites.

Developing a financial model will likely be extremely difficult according to publishing leaders. Senior executives at one major publisher said that the news industry was ‘working retroactively’ because tech companies had launched these products – which scrape their content – without a heads up.

“There was no discussion, and so now we have to try to get paid after it happened,” said one executive. “The way they launched these products, the total secrecy, the fact that there is zero transparency, no communication before it happened, there’s reasons to be pretty pessimistic.”

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

As part of a ‘Pride’ celebration, The U.S. Army shared to social media the story of a transgender Major who now identifies as a woman after previously being suicidally depressed.

The DoD tweeted the following post linking to the story of Maj. Rachel Jones, claiming ‘she’ has ’embraced authenticity’ and should ‘inspire us all’ after becoming head of the U.S. Army Sustainment Command’s Cyber Division:

.@USArmy Maj. Rachel Jones found solace after coming out as a transgender female. Her journey from battling depression & suicidal thoughts to embracing authenticity inspires us all. #WhyWeServe https://t.co/9llx7skuC3

— Department of Defense 🇺🇸 (@DeptofDefense) July 2, 2023

Trans Army Major discusses LGBTQ pride and diversity in the military.

This was posted to the IG account of the U.S. Army Sustainment Command.

The world is laughing at us. pic.twitter.com/a5kzXG0dMF

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 2, 2023

The US military has suicidally depressed transgender officers in leadership positions. pic.twitter.com/0oxOcaE26w

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) July 2, 2023

Caption this pic.twitter.com/gmJBPuqePq

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 2, 2023

What a stunning and brave message to send to America’s military enemies.

This comes on the heels of ‘Admiral’ Rachel Levine, The Biden administration’s transgender Assistant Secretary for Health, declaring that puberty blockers and transgender surgeries are necessary to stop kids killing themselves.

Levine also decreed that Pride should now last the entire Summer, during a weird groomer type ‘interview’ with a trans child.

The weirdness prompted Tucker Carlson to respond, “Few Americans in our history have come as far as Rick Levine. Here’s a fat guy in a Halloween costume who somehow became the federal health minister.”

“What we have here is living proof that in this country, you really can be whatever you want to be,” Carlson continued, adding “If Rick Levine can become ‘Admiral Rachel,’ why can’t you be Napoleon? Or Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India? Ever see that guy’s uniform?”

“The point of Rick Levine’s amazing transformation is not to free you from the inflexible husk that you were born in, so you can be more fully yourself, whatever you decide that is. No, that’s not the point,” Carlson said, adding “Rick Levine’s personal journey has nothing to do with you. It’s about him, it’s his journey. Your fantasies about becoming something totally new and different have not been approved yet. In fact, they’re weird.”

“Shut up and be proud of Admiral Rachel,” he continued, further noting “She’s the one who has smashed glass ceilings, and you’ve just got some kind of weird fetish. So actually, now that we’re saying this out loud, it’s pretty clear that Rick Levine has no interest in liberating you from anything. This is not about liberation, it’s just the opposite. It’s just another religious war, same as all the others. The people who think they’re God versus everybody else.”

Ep. 8 Rick from Boston is telling us he wants to be known as female Admiral Rachel Levine. Accept his lie or pay the consequences, bigot. pic.twitter.com/otDl5EITYs

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 30, 2023

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