Month: June 2025

10 of the Worst State Laws Going Into Effect in July

Even though most state legislatures are done for the year, Americans can expect the government to keep interfering with their lives. Starting July 1, many new state laws take effect. Here are 10 of the most ridiculous. 

1. Florida Requires Schools To Call the Gulf of Mexico the ‘Gulf of America’

On Inauguration Day, President Donald Trump signed an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” In response, Florida passed House Bill 549, which, effective July 1, requires state agencies to update geographic materials to reflect the new federal designation. The law also requires “each district school board or charter school governing board” to adopt “instructional materials…and library media center collections that reflect” the new designation of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

H.B. 549 is not only intrusive to local school districts’ authority over what their students should learn but also costly to the taxpayers who are funding the purchase of all new materials.

2. Minimum Wage Hikes Across 3 States

Across the country, minimum wage increases will take effect on July 1. In Alaska, the minimum wage is increasing from $11.91 per hour to $13 per hour. In Oregon, the standard minimum wage will rise from $14.70 per hour to $15.05 per hour. And in Washington, D.C., the minimum wage will hike from $17.50 per hour to $17.95 per hour. 

Proponents of raising the minimum wage argue that an increase is necessary to ensure everyone is given a “living wage.” But these actions can have unintended consequences, like causing overall employment to decrease, increasing prices for consumers, or causing businesses to close. In D.C., a minimum wage increase for tipped workers was paused until October due to many restaurants being unable to afford the increase from $10 per hour to $12 per hour for these employees.

3. Alabama Bans Smokable Hemp Products

Under a new Alabama law, H.B. 445, it will be illegal to sell or possess smokable hemp products. While consumable hemp products like gummies or drinks will be allowed, smokable products are specifically excluded and banned. “Possession or sale of those products on or after July 1, 2025 could subject an individual to prosecution for a Class C felony,” the attorney general’s office said. In Alabama, a Class C felony is punishable by one to 10 years of imprisonment.  

The remainder of the legislation, which sets requirements for the sale of edible hemp products, dosage limitations, and enforcement by the Alabama Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, won’t take effect until 2026. 

4. Vape Registration in Wisconsin

Starting July 1, vape product manufacturers must certify with the Wisconsin Department of Revenue that their products have been authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or have submitted a premarket tobacco product application annually. The goal of the law is to deter tobacco shops from selling harmful products, but few vapor products have received FDA approval. Critics say the legislation will hurt small business owners and their employees. “Pretty much every vapor product across the board is effectively banned,” Amber Crawford, a Wisconsin vape shop owner, told WQOW, an ABC News affiliate. “It’s about 70% of my revenue,” Crawford said. “We’re going to lose dozens of jobs of people that care about it deeply. Chances are I will get laid off and the store will close.” 

5. Cellphones Banned in Virginia Public Schools

Beginning July 1, Virginia school boards will be required to implement policies restricting cellphone possession and use by students during school hours. The bill aims to reduce learning disruptions, like bullying and harassment, while carving out exceptions—like to address a health concern—and dictates that punishments for cellphone possession alone shall not include a school resource officer, suspension, or expulsion.

Such bans have increased in popularity in part because smart devices have been blamed for causing more depression, anxiety, and bullying among kids and teens, but implementing state-wide policies could backfire. The data are unclear on whether devices are the cause of concerning mental health trends among school-age children, and parents aren’t sold on banning devices. A survey earlier this year found that most parents believe cellphones have a positive effect on their kids’ lives. Regardless of their impact, there is no clear one-size-fits-all solution. 

6. Virginia Expands Cyberbullying Prevention Policies in Public Schools

Public schools in Virginia must also include procedures for preventing and prohibiting cyberbullying both on and off school property in their guidelines and codes of conduct starting July 1. The legislation defines cyberbullying as “bullying that occurs through the use of technology…capable of accessing the internet.” It also mandates that schools provide protections so that students aren’t deterred from reporting bullying and provide resources and support for student victims of cyberbullying. Forcing schools to regulate speech outside of school property introduces First Amendment concerns if policies are overly broad or vague. 

7. Prohibiting Gender Transition Treatments for Minors in Kansas

Under the Help Not Harm Act, minors will be restricted from certain gender treatments beginning July 1, after the Legislature successfully overrode Gov. Laura Kelly’s (D–Kan.) veto in February. Under the new law, gender transition treatments, including hormone blockers and surgery, are prohibited, and state funds, including Medicaid, cannot be used to pay for these treatments. Providing such treatments is defined under the law as unprofessional conduct, and those who violate the law can have their license revoked and be held strictly liable if sued.  

The legislation is meant to protect children “from the irreversible harms of experimental gender transition surgeries and medicines,” according to a joint statement from Republican state Reps. Chris Croft, Dan Hawkins, and Blake Carpenter regarding the veto override. But whether these treatments are deemed beneficial or harmful, the practical implication of this new law is that parents now have less authority over the care their children receive.

8. Wyoming Restricts Access to Bathrooms and Other Public Facilities

Joining 18 other states with public bathroom restrictions, Wyoming’s H.B. 72 requires persons to use the bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers in public facilities that correspond to their biological sex. Rather than punish individuals either civilly or criminally for using the wrong facility, it is up to the government body operating the facility to enforce the law, or face civil liabilities. But like other states that have tried to enforce bathroom use based on sex, the law creates fear and uncertainty about what is permissible use and what the consequences of any violations may be. 

9. Gender Identity Removed From Iowa Civil Rights Act

Under Iowa Senate File 418, gender identity is no longer protected from discrimination in housing, employment, wages, and public accommodations under the state’s civil rights code. Additionally, Iowans can no longer change their sex designation on a birth certificate after undergoing a medical gender transition. Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds stated that before the bill was signed, “the Civil Rights Code blurred the biological line between the sexes” and put commonsense protections for women and girls at risk. Iowa will be the first state in the country to take away civil rights from a group it previously protected since 2007.  

10. The Sunshine State Expands Death Penalty Executions 

Florida has carried out seven executions in 2025, with an eighth scheduled for July. To continue these executions, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed H.B. 903, authorizing the state of Florida to use any execution method “not deemed unconstitutional,” including firing squads, nitrogen gas, and hanging. There are 269 inmates currently on death row. 

Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, Florida has executed 113 people by either electrocution or lethal injection. In that same time, 30 people sentenced to death in the state have been exonerated. The death penalty remains controversial for many reasons, not least of which is the significant risk of executing an innocent person.

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Did NYC Vote for Socialism or Against the Establishment?

This week, Reason editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch are joined by Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson to analyze Zohran Mamdani’s primary win over Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s mayoral race and what it signals about the future of Democratic politics. They also discuss the Senate GOP’s version of President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” and how Republican views on gay marriage have shifted since the Obergefell decision in 2015. Finally, a listener question prompts a discussion on Modern Monetary Theory and the risks it poses from a libertarian perspective.

0:00—What does it mean to be a party pollster?

2:53—Socialist Mamdani wins NYC Democratic primary

11:59—The politics of the housing crisis

15:18—The abundance agenda and Mamdani

21:15—Mamdani as the Trump of the left

27:07—Listener question on Modern Monetary Theory

37:15—Senate GOP version of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”

42:45—Republican voters shift on gay marriage

48:28—Is the GOP more libertarian under Trump?

50:28—Chances Trump might prove us wrong on Iran strategy

54:22—Weekly cultural recommendations

 

Mentioned in the podcast

“On Housing, All New York Politicians Are Socialists,” by Christian Britschgi
“Libya, End Zone Taunting, and the Success Curse,” by Matt Welch
“Sovereignty Is Such a Lonely Word,” by Matt Welch

 

Upcoming Reason Events

The Reason Roundtable Live in NYC!, July 15

The Soho Forum Debate: Jacob Hacker vs. David Goldhill, July 16

 

Today’s Sponsors:

Future of Freedom: If you’re tired of cable news debates and Twitter shouting matches, and you’re looking for serious, good-faith conversations between people who actually care about liberty, then it’s time to check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Each episode dives deep into a single topic—tariffs, campus speech, the Department of Government Efficiency—and brings together two guests who disagree on the best path forward. But here’s the twist: This isn’t a debate show. No interrupting. No dunking. If you believe the future of freedom depends on more than just winning arguments and you’re ready for something deeper than the usual echo chambers, check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Real disagreement. Real ideas. Real conversations. Subscribe to Future of Freedom wherever you get your podcasts.

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The Decline And Fall Of Our So-Called Degreed Experts

The Decline And Fall Of Our So-Called Degreed Experts

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

The first six months of the Trump administration have not been kind to the experts and the degree-holding classes.

Almost daily during the tariff hysterias of March, we were told by university economists and most of the PhDs employed in investment and finance that the U.S. was headed toward a downward, if not recessionary, spiral.

Most economists lectured that trade deficits did not really matter. Or they insisted that the cures to reduce them were worse than the $1.1 trillion deficit itself.

They reminded us that free, rather than fair, trade alone ensured prosperity.

So, the result of Trump’s foolhardy tariff talk would be an impending recession. America would soon suffer rising joblessness, inflation—or rather a return to stagflation—and likely little, if any, increase in tariff revenue as trade volume declined.

Instead, recent data show increases in tariff revenue. Personal real income and savings were up. Job creation exceeded prognoses. There was no surge in inflation. The supposedly “crashed” stock market reached historic highs.

Common-sense Americans might not have been surprised. The prior stock market frenzy was predicated on what was, in theory, supposed to have happened rather than what was likely to occur. After all, if tariffs were so toxic and surpluses irrelevant, why did our affluent European and Asian trading rivals insist on both surpluses and protective tariffs?

Most Americans recalled that the mere threat of tariffs and Trump’s jawboning had led to several trillion dollars in promised foreign investment and at least some plans to relocate manufacturing and assembly back to the United States. Would that change in direction not lead to business optimism and eventually more jobs? Would countries purposely running up huge surpluses through asymmetrical trade practices not have far more to lose in negotiations than those suffering gargantuan deficits?

Were Trump’s art-of-the-deal threats of prohibitive tariffs not mere starting points in negotiations that would eventually lead to likely agreements more favorable to the U.S. than in the past and moderate rather than punitive tariffs?

Would not the value of the huge American consumer market mean that our trade partners, who were racking up substantial surpluses, would agree they could afford modest tariffs and trim their substantial profit margins rather than suicidally price themselves out of a lucrative market entirely?

Economists and bureaucrats were equally wrong on the border.

We were told for four years that only “comprehensive immigration reform” would stop illegal immigration. In fact, most Americans differed. They knew firsthand that we had more than enough immigration laws, but had elected as President Joe Biden, who deliberately destroyed borders and had no intention of enforcing existing laws.

When Trump promised that he would ensure that, instead of 10,000 foreign nationals entering illegally each day, within a month, no one would, our experts scoffed. But if the border patrol went from ignoring or even aiding illegal immigrants to stopping them right at the border, why would such a prediction be wrong?

Those favoring a reduction in illegal immigration and deportations also argued that crime would fall, and citizen job opportunities would increase, given an estimated 500,000 aliens with criminal records had entered illegally during the Biden administration, while millions of other illegal aliens were working off the books, for cash, and often at reduced wages.

Indeed, once the border was closed tightly, hundreds of thousands were returned to their country, and employers began turning to U.S. citizens. Job opportunities did increase. Crime did go down. Legal-only immigration regained its preferred status over illegal entry.

Trump talked of trying voluntary deportation—again to wide ridicule from immigration “experts.” But why would not a million illegal aliens wish to return home “voluntarily”—if they were given free flights, a $1,000 bonus, and, most importantly, a chance later to reapply for legal entry once they arrived home?

Many of our national security experts warned that taking out Iran’s nuclear sites was a fool’s errand. It would supposedly unleash a Middle East tsunami of instability. It would cause a wave of terrorism. It would send oil prices skyrocketing. It would not work, ensuring Iran would soon reply with nuclear weapons.

In fact, oil prices decreased after the American bombing. A twenty-five-minute entrance into Iranian airspace and bombing led to a ceasefire, not a conflagration.

As for a big power standoff, World War III, and 30,000 dead, common sense asked why China would wish the Strait of Hormuz to close, given that it imports half of all Middle Eastern oil produced?

Why would Russia—bogged down in Ukraine and suffering nearly a million casualties—wish to mix it up in Iran, after ignominiously fleeing Syria and the fall of its Assad clients?

Russia usually thinks of Russia, period. It does not lament when tensions elsewhere are expected to spike oil prices. Why would Russia resupply Iran’s destroyed Russian-made anti-aircraft systems, when it was desperate to ward off Ukrainian air attacks on its homeland, and Iran would likely again lose any imported replacements?

As for waves of terror, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis have suffered enormous losses from Israel. Their leadership has been decapitated; their streams of Iranian money have been mostly truncated. Why would they rush to Iran’s side to war with Israel, when Iran did not come to their aid when they were battling and losing to the Israelis?

Has a theater-wide war really ever started when one side entered and left enemy territory in 25 minutes, suffering no casualties and likely killing few of the enemy?

As far as the extent of damage to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, why should we believe our expert pundit class?

Prior to the American and Israeli bombing, many of them warned that Iran was not on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon, and therefore, there was little need for any such preemptive action.

Then, post facto, the same experts flipped. Now they claimed, after the bombing that severely damaged most Iranian nuclear sites, that there was an increased threat, given that some enriched uranium (which they had previously discounted) surely had survived and thus marked a new existential danger of an Iranian nuclear bomb.

Was Trump really going to “blow up”, “destroy” or “cripple” NATO, as our diplomatic experts insisted, when his first-term jawboning led from six to twenty-three nations meeting their two percent of GDP defense spending promises?

Given two ongoing theater-wide wars, given Trump’s past correct predictions about the dangers of the Nord Stream II pipeline, given the vulnerability of an anemic NATO to Russian expansionism, and given that Putin did not invade during Trump’s first term, unlike the three presidencies before and after his own, why wouldn’t NATO agree to rearm to five percent, and appreciate Trump’s efforts both to bolster the capability of the alliance and the need to end the Ukraine war?

Why were our “scientific” pollsters so wrong in the last three presidential elections, and so at odds with the clearly discernible electoral shifts in the general electorate?

Where were crackpot ideas like defund the police, transgender males competing in women’s sports, and open borders first born and nurtured?

Answer: the university, and higher education in general.

The list of wrongheaded, groupthink, and degreed expertise could be vastly expanded. We remember the “51 intelligence authorities” who swore the Hunter Biden laptop was “likely” cooked up by the Russians. Our best and brightest economists signed letters insisting that Biden’s multitrillion-dollar wasteful spending would not result in inflation spikes. Our global warming professors’ past predictions should have ensured that Americans were now boiling, with tidal waves destroying beachfront communities, including Barack Obama’s two beachfront multimillion-dollar estates.

Our legal eagles, after learning nothing from the bogus Mueller investigation and adolescent Steele dossier, but with impressive Ivy League degrees, pontificated for years that, by now, Donald Trump would be in jail for life, given 91 “walls are closing in” and “bombshell” indictments.

So why are the degreed classes so wrong and yet so arrogantly never learn anything from their past flawed predictions?

One, our experts usually receive degrees from our supposedly marquee universities. But as we are now learning from long overdue autopsies of institutionalized campus racial bias, neo-racial segregation, 50-percent-plus price-gauging surcharges on federal grants, and rabid anti-Semitism, higher education in America has become anti-Enlightenment. Universities now wage war against free-thinkers, free speech, free expression, and anything that freely questions the deductive groupthink of the diversity/equity/inclusion commissariat, and global warming orthodoxies.

The degreed expert classes emerge from universities whose faculties are 90–95 percent left-wing and whose administrations are overstaffed and terrified of their radical students. The wonder is not that the experts are incompetent and biased, but that there are a brave few who are not.

Two, Donald Trump drove the degreed class insane to the degree it could no longer, even if it were willing and able (and it was not), offer empirical assessments of his policies. From his crude speech to his orange skin to his Queens accent to his MAGA base to his remarkable counterintuitive successes and to his disdain for the bicoastal elite, our embarrassing experts would rather be dead wrong and anti-Trump than correct in their assessments—if they in any small way helped Trump.

Three, universities are not just biased, but increasingly mediocre and ever more isolated from working Americans and their commonsense approaches to problem solving. PhD programs in general are not as rigorous as they were even two decades ago. Grading, assessments, and evaluations in professional schools must increasingly weigh non-meritocratic criteria, given their admissions and hiring protocols are not based on disinterested evaluation of past work and expertise.

The vast endowments of elite campuses, the huge profit-making foreign enrollments, and the assured, steady stream of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal aid created a sense of fiscal unreality, moral smugness, unearned superiority, and ultimately, blindness to just how isolated and disliked the professoriate had become.

But the public has caught on that too many Ivy-League presidents were increasingly a mediocre, if not incompetent, bunch. Most university economists could not run a small business. The military academies did not always turn out the best generals and admirals. The most engaging biographers were not professors. And plumbers and electricians were usually more skilled in their trades than most journalist graduates were in their reporting.

Add it all up, and the reputation of our predictors, prognosticators, and experts has been radically devalued to the point of utter worthlessness.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 06/30/2025 – 17:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/trdnQRK Tyler Durden

MIT Invents “Bubble Wrap” That Pulls Fresh Water From The Air…Even In The Driest Places In The World

MIT Invents “Bubble Wrap” That Pulls Fresh Water From The Air…Even In The Driest Places In The World

MIT researchers have invented a new water-harvesting device — a high-tech version of “bubble wrap” — that can pull safe drinking water straight from the air, even in extreme environments like Death Valley, the driest desert in North America, according to LiveScience.

In a study published June 11 in Nature Water, the team described how their innovation could help address global water scarcity. “It works wherever you may find water vapor in the air,” the researchers wrote.

The device is built from hydrogel, a material that can absorb large amounts of water, sandwiched between two glass layers resembling a window. At night, the hydrogel draws moisture from the air. During the day, a special coating on the glass keeps it cool, allowing water to condense and drip into a collection system.

The hydrogel is molded into dome shapes — likened to “a sheet of bubble wrap” — that swell when absorbing moisture. These domes increase surface area, helping the material absorb more water.

LiveScience writes that the system was tested for a week in Death Valley, a region spanning California and Nevada that holds the record as the hottest and driest place in North America.

Despite the harsh conditions, the harvester consistently produced between 57 and 161.5 milliliters of water daily — about a quarter to two-thirds of a cup. In more humid regions, researchers expect even greater yields. According to MIT representatives, this approach outperforms earlier water-from-air technologies and does so without needing electricity.

One major breakthrough was solving a known problem with hydrogel-based water harvesters: lithium salts used to improve absorption often leak into the water, making it unsafe. The new design adds glycerol, which stabilizes the salt and keeps leakage to under 0.06 parts per million — a level the U.S. Geological Survey deems safe for groundwater.

Though a single panel can’t supply an entire household, its small footprint means several can be installed together. The team estimates that eight 3-by-6-foot (1-by-2-meter) panels could provide enough drinking water for a household in areas lacking reliable sources. Compared to the cost of bottled water in the U.S., the system could pay for itself in under a month and remain functional for at least a year.

“We imagine that you could one day deploy an array of these panels, and the footprint is very small because they are all vertical,” said Xuanhe Zhao, an MIT professor and co-author of the study. “Now people can build it even larger, or make it into parallel panels, to supply drinking water to people and achieve real impact.”

The researchers plan to continue testing the device in other low-resource areas to better understand its performance under different environmental conditions.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 06/30/2025 – 16:40

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/YLrEmvS Tyler Durden

Stay Sane!

Stay Sane!

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

“Betting against Donald Trump is usually a bad idea.”

– Insurrection Barbie on “X”

What apparently riles the credentialed political Left — the “gay / race communists” in the apt new phrase — more than anything, is that most of the country has opted to not be insane. This follows a decade-long attempt to drive the country insane, of course, to believe in things that are patently untrue and absurd, and to utilize falsehood and absurdity to garishly destroy the nation.

So, it fits that Donald Trump, the uber-realist of political game-playing, pushes what remains of the Democratic Party into a rapture of impotent rage. They’ve got nothing left but the empty acting-out of lunatics in an asylum of their own making. The wrathful grass-widows choking on their chardonnay in Martha’s Vineyard, the furious nose-rings steaming under their keffiyehs in the summer heat, the “Transtifas” storming police lines with their ridiculous umbrellas, the doddering Boomer-hippies reenacting the festive protest marches of 1968, minus a single coherent principle, the wigged-out congresspersons storming the ICE detention centers, the Covid vaccine victims duped into multiple organ failure (their hearts and brains especially), the “allies” of every loser group from Bangor to Brentwood in a frenzy of baffled grievance — these poor, lost wretches so far gone that even the likes of David Axelrod, James Carville, and Frank Luntz can’t stand to be associated with them anymore, is all the Democrats have left in their manure-stuffed donkey stable.

The abiding mystery remains: what exactly set in motion this fantastic cascade of political madness, especially among the highly educated demographic.

The seemingly obvious answer is higher education itself, infested since the 1960s with Marxist zealots, sexual malcontents, and resentment-filled diversity hires. And while that has surely played its part, it doesn’t sufficiently explain the ugly dynamic.

Another explanation runs toward a plot by international “oligarchical” corruptniks to corner all the goodies of the world and either turn the rest of us into their slaves, or just kill us off — and to do it in such a way as to rub it in our faces, so as to provide the corruptniks with some mirthful entertainment as they go about their dastardly business.

For instance, the recent weekend wedding of Huma Abedin and Alex Soros on the very day that the moiling minions whom they sponsor held their nationwide “No Kings” rallies inn the streets.

Huma, the bride, you recall, was Hillary Clinton’s sidekick back in Hillary’s glory days, especially the time of her glorious and inevitable rise (her regal “turn”) to occupy the White House, thwarted inconceivably by the preposterous showman, Mr. Trump. Hillary, you also might recall, left the White House broke-ass-broke in 2001 only to agglomerate a stupendous multi-hundred-million-dollar fortune working as a US Senator and then Secretary of State (salaries $170,000 and $260,600 respectively). That is, Hillary acquired her great fortune in about the same way that the royalty-of-old acquired theirs — by grift and theft.

And Huma, former wife of disgraced congressman and convicted Internet pervert Anthony Weiner, is now wed to decade-younger financial royalist Alex Soros, son of George, who made the bulk of his fortune (estimated $7.2-billion) shorting the British pound sterling in 1992 and went on to found a vast array of NGOs and so-called philanthropies (the Open Society Foundations) that specialize in influencing elections worldwide, conducting regime-change campaigns, and lately financing seditious movements within the United States. Heir-apparent Alex is reported to have taken over the day-to-day operations of that network — but, we must have no kings, you understand.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has actually tried, against all odds and endless threats, to represent the interests of common US citizens, that is, most of us, the non-royal, and to navigate the collective consciousness of this human mass away from the long-creeping, imposed insanity. He was blind-sided and sandbagged by enemies in his naïve first term. But Trump has returned — after an astonishing exhibition of spiteful incompetence by his adversaries — much-chastened by previous failure and injury with a far-better crew, much better-prepared with a program for redeeming a spavined economy, reinstating common sense in the daily life of the nation (i.e., resistance to absurd propositions), and reform of a dangerous rogue bureaucracy.

The remnant Left is reeling now, most recently from last week’s SCOTUS decision foreclosing the universal injunction nonsense sponsored by Norm Eisen and Mary McCord’s lawfare corps. That campaign, which raged for five months, might prove to be their last gasp. You know, though, that they are plotting another round of election fraud for the 2026 midterms. But it looks like their previous frauds are on the verge of being uncovered — finally, after years of evasion and no help from a treasonous news media — and there’s a fair chance that they can’t pull off more fraud next time. Passage of a proof-of-citizenship law for national elections could seal that deal.

But first, the massive hurdle of the “Big Beautiful Bill.” Whatever its virtues and defects, it must be gotten over for this larger effort of a journey back to civilizational sanity to continue. Hazards lurk at every turn. The awesome national debt hangs ominously over the whole enterprise and might sink it yet. Certain players in Europe steer deeper into their own insanity and look more and more like true enemies of the USA — far more than Russia does now — and then there is China: powerful, still rising, plotting cunningly.

Plenty of travail awaits, but we’ll be better able to get through it with our minds right and our aim true. Aim to stay sane.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 06/30/2025 – 16:20

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SCOTUS Puts Skrmetti SDP Case Out Of Its Misery

Last week I speculated what would happen to the ACLU’s cert petition in Skrmetti that raised the Due Process issue. I wondered if the Court would GVR the parental rights issue in light of Mahmoud.

Today’s order list denied review in L.W. v. Skrmetti. There were no recorded dissents. It seems the Due Process claim is now dead. The Tennessee law, and others like it, will now go into effect.

Indeed, the Court GVR’d several related cases. First, West Virginia excluded treatment for gender dysphoria from Medicaid. The Fourth Circuit held this exclusion violated the Equal Protection Clause. Second, North Carolina excluded treatment for gender dysphoria from the state employee health plan. The Fourth Circuit likewise ruled against the state. Third, Idaho denied Medicaid coverage for sex-reassignment surgery. After Skrmetti was argued, the Ninth Circuit found this ruling was unlawful.

These issues will bubble back to the Court in a year or so. Let’s see if the Fourth Circuit can see the writing on the wall. Speaking of which, guess which Circuit was the “Biggest Loser” at the Court this term? No, it was not my beloved Fifth Circuit.

David Lat explains (based on Adam Feldman’s Stat Pack):

Some circuits got reversed a lot. Subjectively and anecdotally, it felt to me that the Fifth Circuit took it on the chin this Term in terms of reversals. But if you look at reversals in percentage terms, the First, Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits were the most reversed, all with a 100 percent reversal rate—based on two, eight, four, and five cases decided by SCOTUS, respectively. So with a 0-8 record before the justices, the Fourth Circuit was the “biggest loser,” in terms of the court with the highest reversal rate and the highest total number of cases. (The Ninth Circuit had three cases that were dismissed as improvidently granted.)

The Fifth Circuit didn’t do that badly. The Fifth Circuit had the most total cases reversed (10), and some were high-profile—such as Bondi v. VanDerStock (a statutory-interpretation case about “ghost guns”), Kennedy v. Braidwood Management (an Appointments Clause challenge to an Affordable Care Act-created task force), and FCC v. Consumers Research (a nondelegation challenge to the FCC’s “universal service” scheme). But the Fifth Circuit wound up with a 77 percent overall reversal rate, since it was also affirmed in three appeals—including the closely followed Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton (a First Amendment challenge to an age restriction for pornography websites).

I think the reversal rate should include GVRs as well.

Stay tuned for more.

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Pennsylvania Gives Amazon Potentially Unlimited Sales Tax Exemption

Amazon, the tech and online retail juggernaut, is expanding its physical footprint, with a little help from Pennsylvania taxpayers.

“Amazon plans to spend $20 billion to build two data centers in Pennsylvania, a move that state officials say will generate thousands of jobs over the next decade and stoke considerable economic activity,” wrote Stephen Caruso and Kate Huangpu of Spotlight PA, an independent media outlet. “But many key details, like the centers’ full impact on electricity supply and prices, and the amount of tax revenue the state will forfeit to Amazon, are still unknown.”

“In March 2024, Talen Energy sold its 960-megawatt (MW) data center to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for $650 million,” Jeff Luse wrote in November 2024 for Reason. “The data center is a co-located facility, meaning it will draw electricity directly from Susquehanna Steam Electric Station—a nuclear power plant that generates 2.5 gigawatts of power annually—rather than from the grid.” The other facility will be located in a former U.S. Steel mill and hook into the state’s existing power grid, and there is the possibility of a third facility later on.

The data centers will support Amazon’s artificial intelligence and cloud computing, which require substantial processing power. Rick Siger, secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, said the project “will drive enormous positive tax impacts for our Commonwealth, counties, and municipalities, and will create at least 1,250 high-paying, high-tech jobs as well as thousands of construction jobs.”

Unfortunately, that’s not a guarantee. “The data center industry has grown rapidly in recent years, and state governors have touted the jobs it would create,” Ellen Thomas wrote at Business Insider. But “once built, data center facilities don’t employ large numbers of permanent employees, and the economic development contracts they sign in exchange for tax incentives often reflect that.”

Data centers do initially create plenty of work for construction crews, but once operational, they require only a small permanent staff for general upkeep. “Most permanent data center jobs are in security and landscaping, alongside a handful of technicians who monitor the facilities’ computers,” write Caruso and Huangpu, citing Greg LeRoy of public subsidy watchdog organization Good Jobs First.

In fairness, Pennsylvania is spending considerably less taxpayer money than most states do to attract new businesses. Officials in St. Joseph County, Indiana, voted last year to give Amazon tax breaks and incentives worth $4 billion or more, to build a data center in the area. Arlington County, Virginia, offered Amazon as much as $750 million to build its second corporate headquarters there.

On the other hand, Pennsylvania’s “only direct financial investment” in its Amazon data centers will come in the form of “$10 million for ‘targeted workforce development efforts,'” Caruso and Huangpu write. But that doesn’t mean Keystone State taxpayers are otherwise off the hook: “Pennsylvania didn’t offer a new, targeted incentive package to Amazon, but the tech giant has already been approved for a tax break that the commonwealth gives to companies that build data centers here.”

A state program exempts large data centers from paying sales tax on any purchases of certain “computer data center equipment.” Any company that spends at least $75 million of “new investment” to create a data center that “creates 25 new jobs” in a county with no more than 250,000 residents, and pays at least $1 million in annual payroll at the site, can apply for an exemption from all sales taxes paid to purchase equipment to operate servers, including software, cooling systems, and security and monitoring equipment.

“The law requires neither the buyer nor the seller to report the cost of exempt transactions to the state,” Caruso and Huangpu add. “That means the exact cost is unknown. Still, the state estimates the lost tax revenue in budgets.” In his budget proposal for the 2025–26 fiscal year, Gov. Josh Shapiro estimated $43.1 million in lost tax revenue from the program, growing to $51.1 million by the end of the decade. Former Gov. Tom Wolf predicted in his proposal for the 2022–23 fiscal year that by 2025, the program would cost nearly $75 million in lost revenue. “Jeffrey Johnson, a spokesperson for the Department of Revenue, said the original projection was reduced after lower-than-expected use in early years,” Caruso and Huangpu write.

Still, it’s worth remembering that Amazon—the world’s second-largest company by revenue, behind only Walmart—committed to spend $20 billion on data centers in Pennsylvania alone. Clearly, the tech giant is not hurting for cash, and Pennsylvania taxpayers should not be on the hook for a potentially unlimited cash giveaway to a private company.

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No, That Viral Study Doesn’t Show You Can Improve Your Mental Health by Deactivating Instagram

A study by Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) on the effects of social media went viral on X over the weekend. While the post represents the results as “shocking,” the study itself found little evidence that social media use hurts its users.

The SIEPR study was published as a working paper in April with the National Bureau of Economic Research. Of the 27 co-authors, most of whom are associated with American universities, eight are researchers from Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook. The researchers recruited 19,857 Facebook users and 15,585 Instagram users to carry out “the largest-ever experimental study on the effect of social media deactivation on users’ emotional state.”

More than a quarter of the Facebook and Instagram users were assigned to treatment groups and were paid to deactivate their respective accounts for six weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election. (All other users were part of the control group, which required users to deactivate their accounts for only the first of the six weeks.) Researchers conducted surveys on self-reported happiness, depression, and anxiety before and after the experiment. These metrics were combined to make a joint “emotional state index” (ESI).

The X post emphasizes that users who deactivated Instagram enjoyed an improvement of about 0.04 standard deviations in their ESI while users who deactivated Facebook enjoyed an improvement of roughly 0.06 standard deviations. But the authors themselves reported that the effect of deactivating Instagram on ESI is statistically insignificant after adjusting for multiple hypothesis testing. Moreover, the effect of deactivating Instagram on anxiety and depression was statistically indistinguishable from zero.

In the second case, the effect of deactivating Facebook on anxiety was also indistinguishable from zero. However, the effects on depression and ESI were statistically significant. The authors contextualize their results by explaining that the average of the six effects—Facebook deactivation on happiness, anxiety, and depression and Instagram deactivation on happiness, anxiety, and depression—is 0.038 standard deviations, which is “equivalent to 3.8 percent of people saying they feel happy ‘often’ instead of ‘sometimes.'”

Statistical significance does not necessarily imply substantial real-world differences. In this case, it does not. Christopher Ferguson, a professor of psychology at Stetson University, says that the threshold for distinguishing real psychological effects from statistical noise is much higher (0.21 standard deviations) than what was measured in the study. The standard for clinical significance, which he defines as “an effect people might actually begin to notice in the real world,” is higher still (0.41 standard deviations). Ferguson cautions that “a high proportion of nonsense relationships become ‘statistically significant’ with large datasets” and that “false positives…shouldn’t be interpreted as hypothesis supportive.” Ferguson also says that while the survey questions appear direct, they “are not clinically validated measures of depression or anxiety.”

The study suffers from additional methodological constraints. The fact that the study focuses on a specific historical time period—the six weeks leading up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election—raises questions about external validity; it “tells us very little about day-to-day interactions on social media,” says Ferguson. The authors themselves urge caution about generalizing results outside their sample because “less than one percent of the people who were invited to the study completed the experiment.”

Ferguson says the study is being widely represented as “supporting the idea that reducing social media time improves mental health outcomes when…it found no reliable evidence for such a relationship.”

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The 5th Circuit Rejects Qualified Immunity for a Child-Snatching Texas Cop Who Falsely Alleged Abandonment

Around 10 a.m. on a Friday in October 2018, 14-year-old Jade McMurry was confronted by two police officers, Kevin Brunner and Alexandra Weaver, at the door to the apartment in Midland, Texas, that she shared with her parents and her 12-year-old brother. Jade, who was homeschooled and in the midst of her online studies, did not understand what the officers, both of whom worked for the Midland Independent School District, were doing there. But within a minute, they had decided she needed to be rescued.

Brunner told Jade to put on warmer clothing so she could leave the apartment. As Jade began to follow Brunner’s instructions, body camera video showed, he asked her, “Do you mind if she [Weaver] comes in the house with you?” Jade’s response was ambiguous: “Mm-hmm.” Then she burst into tears, saying, “I’m scared.”

Taking that as an invitation, Weaver entered the apartment and began poking around. She inspected the living room and the kitchen, opening the pantry, the refrigerator, and the freezer. Her search found no evidence that Jade was in any danger. She and Brunner nevertheless removed Jade from her home, grilled her, prevented her from communicating with her parents, and took her to Abell Junior High School. Jade was detained until that afternoon, when the cops finally let her go after Texas Child Protective Services (CPS) concluded there was no evidence of abuse or neglect.

That bizarre episode, Jade’s parents argued in a federal civil rights lawsuit they filed in October 2020, violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. Megan and Adam McMurry also cited the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of due process, which they said the officers had violated by snatching Jade without notifying her parents or giving them an opportunity to contest that intervention. But Weaver argued that she could not reasonably have been expected to know her actions were unconstitutional—a claim that an appeals court panel unanimously rejected last Friday.

That ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit is the latest development in a case that began after Megan McMurry, who was then employed as a special education teacher at Abell Junior High School, left on a five-day trip to Kuwait. Her husband had been deployed to Kuwait with the National Guard, and she was looking into a potential job that would have allowed the family to relocate there. Weaver, who worked at Abell, knew about the trip because McMurry had emailed all of the school’s employees about it.

McMurry’s colleagues also knew she had asked a neighbor, Vanessa Vallejos, to keep an eye on Jade and her younger brother, Connor, during the trip. Vallejos and her husband knew Jade well because she would often babysit their 6-year-old son. McMurry had also arranged for co-workers to transport Connor, a student at Abell, to and from school. But on October 26, 2018, Abell’s guidance counselor, who had agreed to bring Connor to school, was unable to do so because she was sick. So she texted Weaver, who lived in the neighborhood, asking if she could give Connor a ride. Although another Abell employee ended up bringing Connor to school, Weaver’s involvement did not end there.

Weaver somehow got it into her head that Jade had been “abandoned” and was in urgent need of a “welfare check.” Brunner, her supervisor, agreed, which is how they both ended up at the McMurrys’ apartment that morning. Although Jade reiterated that Vallejos was checking in on her and Connor, offering to put the officers in touch with her, they were unfazed. They had already filed a CPS complaint, and they were determined to act on their unfounded suspicions.

Brunner and Weaver were so sure of themselves, in fact, that they pursued criminal charges against McMurry even after CPS decided there was no case to be made. In January 2020, a jury, after deliberating for five minutes, acquitted McMurry of abandoning or endangering her children.

That prompt acquittal suggested the jurors did not think Weaver and Brunner’s avowed concern for Jade’s welfare was reasonable. Nor did U.S. District Judge David Counts, who in September 2021 rejected the officers’ motion to dismiss the McMurrys’ lawsuit.

Weaver and Brunner argued that they were shielded by qualified immunity, a doctrine that bars federal civil rights lawsuits unless they allege misconduct that violated “clearly established” law. After Counts rejected that claim, Brunner appealed to the 5th Circuit, which affirmed Counts’ decision in December 2022.

“The facts here are particularly egregious,” Judge Andrew Oldham noted in a concurring opinion. He elaborated:

Weaver performed an illegal search in front of her supervisor (Brunner). And instead of settling for one constitutional violation (the search), Brunner went on to commit two more (unlawfully seizing [Jade] and violating the McMurrys’ due-process rights). And after taking custody of [Jade], Brunner prevented [her] from talking to her father and the Vallejos for a significant amount of time. All while [Jade] was crying and confused. Then CPS told Brunner that his safety concerns were baseless. And still, inexplicably, Brunner persisted and pushed for criminal charges against Mrs. McMurry. Like CPS, a jury of Mrs. McMurry’s peers squarely rejected Brunner’s charges. But the damage was already done: Mrs. McMurry was already fired, was already prevented from teaching again, and had already spent 19 hours in jail.

After that resounding defeat, Brunner unsuccessfully asked the 5th Circuit to reconsider the case and unsuccessfully sought Supreme Court review. Then Brunner and Weaver filed motions for summary judgment with the district court, reasserting their qualified immunity claims. Unsurprisingly, Counts was no more impressed by their arguments the second time around.

The 5th Circuit “has already held in this case that [Jade] was unlawfully seized ‘in violation of the Fourth Amendment as a reasonable fourteen-year-old would not have believed she was free to leave when an officer removed [her] from her home for questioning while instructing her not to respond to calls from her father,'” Counts noted in June 2024. “Defendants’ motions even confirm the facts underlying that holding. So no, this was not ‘a consensual act of transportation’; [Jade] was unlawfully seized in violation of her Fourth Amendment rights.”

Were those rights “clearly established”? As Counts noted, the 5th Circuit had already said they were “under these exact facts.”

As for the due process claim, Jade “was following her parents’ instruction to continue her homeschooling in the family apartment during school hours,” Counts wrote. “Defendants then overruled that parental instruction by unlawfully removing [Jade] without a court order or exigent circumstances. Thus, Defendants ‘obviously deprived the McMurrys of their liberty interest’ in the care, custody, and management of their child.”

The McMurrys “did not receive the process they were due,” Oldham had noted. “In fact, they received no process whatsoever. No ex parte court order, no warrant, no notice, no hearing. Nothing. Surely, the McMurrys had a right to at least some predeprivation process before their child was snatched from their home.”

You might think those unambiguous decisions would clear the way for the McMurrys to finally present their claims to a jury. But after Counts reiterated that Weaver was not entitled to qualified immunity, she appealed that ruling to the 5th Circuit, which upheld it last week.

“The parties do not dispute that Weaver searched the refrigerator without a court order or consent,” Judge Carolyn King writes in an opinion joined by the two other members of the 5th Circuit panel. “To comply with the Fourth Amendment, the search must be justified by exigent circumstances. But Weaver does not argue that there were exigent circumstances, and the district court found that there were none. Instead, Weaver relies on a ‘special needs’ or ‘community caretaking’ exception to the warrant requirement. Neither applies here.”

A warrant “may not be required where there is a ‘special need’ that is ‘divorced from the State’s general interest in law enforcement,'” King notes. Likewise “when the police perform ‘community caretaking functions’ that are ‘totally divorced from the detection, investigation, or acquisition of evidence relating to the violation of a criminal statute.'” But the search in this case was obviously related to a criminal investigation, as confirmed by the charges that McMurry later faced.

Was Weaver on notice that her search was unconstitutional? King thinks so, noting that the 5th Circuit, in a case decided a decade before Weaver perused the McMurrys’ kitchen, had “held that government officials conducting home visits ‘to investigate possible child abuse’ must satisfy ‘the typical Fourth Amendment standards of a court order, consent, or exigent circumstances.'”

That precedent, Gates v. Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services, also established that “the government may not seize a child from his or her parents absent a court order, parental consent, or exigent circumstances,” King notes. “Again, Weaver does not argue there were exigent circumstances, and a jury could find that Weaver did not have reasonable cause to believe that fourteen-year old [Jade] faced any ‘immediate danger’ at home alone in a gated apartment complex in the middle of the day.”

The due process claim against Weaver “is premised on [Jade’s] Fourth Amendment claim for unreasonable seizure,” King adds. “Accordingly, the McMurrys have established a constitutional violation sufficient to survive summary judgment for the same reasons: [Jade] was seized without a court order or exigent circumstances.”

In a concurring opinion, Judge James Ho highlights one of the arguments offered by Weaver’s appellate lawyer. Because Jade was studying at home, the lawyer suggested during oral argument in February, the apartment may have qualified as a school, a setting in which Fourth Amendment requirements are relaxed. “Was she taken from an apartment or was she taken from her school?” he said. “There’s no case law whatsoever that establishes that an apartment stays an apartment when you’re going to school.”

That position is “obviously wrong as a matter of rudimentary constitutional principle,” Ho writes. “The Fourth Amendment expressly assures every one of us—including families who homeschool—that ‘[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.’ To justify intrusions on this bedrock liberty based on the educational choices parents make for their children does not evade the constitutional objection—it exacerbates it.”

Ho also takes the opportunity to reiterate his dismay at the 5th Circuit’s repeated rejection of the First Amendment lawsuit that Priscilla Villarreal, an independent journalist in Laredo, filed after she was arrested for asking a police officer questions about a public suicide and a fatal car crash. Villarreal cited Supreme Court decisions recognizing that qualified immunity does not require highly fact-specific precedents in cases involving conduct that is “obviously unconstitutional.” But the appeals court “waved away those decisions on the ground that they’re ‘Eighth Amendment cases,'” Ho writes, “and that they establish only a ‘narrow[] obviousness exception’ that should not apply to obvious violations of the First Amendment.”

Ho thinks that decision, along with a 2011 precedent involving religious freedom, may have encouraged Weaver’s lawyers to argue that she deserved qualified immunity even though her conduct was plainly outrageous. “It seems absurd to suggest that the most egregious constitutional violations imaginable are somehow immune from liability precisely because they’re so egregious,” he writes. “It would make a mockery of our rights to grant qualified immunity just because no one in government has yet to be abusive enough to commit that particular violation—and then stubborn enough to litigate it, not only before a district court, but also in the court of appeals.”

Although “I’m of course duty bound to follow en banc precedent,” Ho adds, “I’m not obliged to extend it….I will not make things worse by extending this mistaken body of precedent and refusing to protect citizens from obvious violations of the Fourth Amendment as well as the First.”

Ho also questions the application of qualified immunity to cases that do not involve “split-second” decisions. “It’s one thing to grant qualified immunity when it comes to police officers who are forced to make split-second judgment calls in life-and-death situations,” he says. “It’s quite another thing to immunize public officials who make a deliberate and calculated decision to violate one’s constitutional rights.”

Although the McMurrys so far have beaten back every challenge to their lawsuit, their case illustrates how difficult in can be to vindicate your constitutional rights. “A lot of cops, like these two, think they can do whatever they want and search whatever they want and make up their own rules because they believe nobody will hold them accountable,” Megan McMurry told me last year. “It has been almost six years [now almost seven], but I want to change that narrative. Our system is broken. Our rights were violated and our lives have been constantly trampled through as we have fought to defend those rights.”

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