We know what’s coming and we are prepared.
📵 🇺🇸 👤 US to implement Digital ID if "KIDS Act" passes in the House today
Buried inside the KIDS Act are provisions that will push online services to verify all users’ ages, require government-directed moderation policies for online speech, and even create new rules about private and encrypted communications. While supporters continue to claim this bill protects minors online, its requirements come at the expense of privacy, free expression, and the ability of people of all ages to use the internet without revealing sensitive data.
Supporters of KOSA have said the bill doesn’t require age verification. And technically, the KOSA section of the bill does say that KOSA shouldn’t be read to require age verification.
Throughout the KOSA section of the legislation, special protections, controls, messaging settings, and parental tools are required whenever a website or app “knows or should have known” a user is a child (defined in the bill as anyone under 13) or a teen (defined as anyone between 13 and 16 years old).
The problem is a website operator doesn’t need actual knowledge that a user is a minor to get in legal trouble. It applies when a platform “knows or should have known” a user’s age—a low, negligence-style standard of knowledge. If an online service gets it wrong, it’s going to be up to courts and regulators to decide, after the fact, if an online service “should” have known a user was 16.
To try to avoid liability, services will have to determine which users are teenagers and which are not. Most won’t be able to simply trust their users. They’ll have to collect more information about age, before any lawsuit or government action arises. Some companies may respond by requesting driver's licenses or passports. Others will rely on age-estimation systems that attempt to guess users' ages by looking at existing activity or doing facial scans. Existing estimation systems make mistakes when estimating children’s ages correctly, which is a big problem when that is the population KOSA is trying to protect.
The bill specifically requires policies addressing the "sale or use" of narcotic drugs, tobacco products, cannabis products, gambling, and alcohol. It also restricts discussions around financial fraud.
Sounds straightforward enough. Then you remember how people actually talk—online and off. Can teens discuss addiction and recovery? Can a 15-year-old post that she’s worried she has a friend who is drinking too much? Can they seek advice about a parent’s gambling problem, or get help if they or a family member have been scammed? Can they participate in harm-reduction communities or discuss substance abuse treatment? All of these young people would be engaging in lawful speech when discussing topics covered by KOSA’s enumerated harms.
The bill does not directly ban those conversations. But it places platforms under huge pressure to create and enforce moderation policies around broad categories of lawful speech. Faced with legal risk, many services will inevitably choose to remove that speech or restrict those discussions to spaces where they know only adults can participate. We’ve seen this movie before. When legal risk goes up, platforms will take down more speech.
The KIDS Act Regulates Private Messages, Too
The KIDS Act never answers an obvious question: how exactly is a platform supposed to address those activities if they’re inside encrypted communications that it can’t read? That will create pressure for providers to weaken private communications or limit features on encrypted private services.
Like many other parts of the KIDS Act, these private messaging provisions also depend on websites and apps knowing who is a minor and who is not. The result is more age checks, more restrictions, and less privacy online.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/kids-act-would-require-age-checks-get-online
🇮🇷🚫🚢 My analysis of the Strait of Hormuz over the last 24 hours.
If the tankers use the Iran route, they are dominantly Iran-related. If the tankers use the Oman route, they are not, and never sanctioned.
I have heard from ship owners that most tankers cannot use the Iran route because the EU has not lifted sanctions on IRGC. Using the Iran route would risk sanctions, making the Oman route the only viable option.
With more conflict going on between IRGC and the US, the visible AIS data on Oman's tanker route is going to go dark again, which means Iran will have to keep escalating in order to completely halt flows.
For the US, the fact that the Oman route might be blocked presents it with a big ultimatum: either the US escalates or gives IRGC control of the Strait of Hormuz. Logic says there's no way that would happen, so escalation will continue.
Given that Trump has made it obvious that he does not want to escalate, I fear that the IRGC would just keep escalating until ...
📝 🎥 🎬 What is notable about Citizen Vigilante is that it drags the vigilante genre kicking and screaming from the 1970s to the 2020s. | Millennial Woes
The average liberal instinctively bristles at the tropes of classical vigilante cinema - “soft judges”, “nanny state”, “timid policing”, “moral decline”, “criminal parasites living off hard-working decent ordinary people” - but they long ago came to accept the genre as a necessary sop to right-wing idiots. I think the attitude was: “Let them have their trashy bread and circuses, if it keeps them docile while we remake their world around them.” After all, the tropes referred to realities that were incidental, not fundamental.
But today there are new realities, which today’s liberal cannot stand to see acknowledged because this strikes at the core of his worldview. These realities are fundamental, not incidental.
The first reality is that diversity has, far from improving White societies, degraded them in ...
— 🇺🇸/🇮🇷 NEW: Maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz has fallen to the same level as it was during the war
The MoU has only raised it from approximately 5-10 vessels a day to about 15-20 vessels a day.
For reference, peacetime traffic through the Strait is supposed to be 150-200 vessels daily, the current volume is only 10% of that.
@Middle_East_Spectator
🇺🇸đź‡đź‡ą I've been told by a friend from Ohio that one of the reasons the elites are so hysterical about Haitians having to go home, even some Republicans, is apartment owners love renting to them, especially if they are paying government-subsidized rents.
Think about the insanity of that. We are subsidizing the rents of foreign nationals, driving up the cost of housing for native Americans by diminishing supply and increasing demand. That is as un-American as anything our government could do to us.
đź“ť Marko Jukic: A large amount of post-2020 migration in the U.S., Ireland, UK, perhaps other places appears to be a massive bailout for Boomer landlords and hoteliers, where the government imports "refugees" who then are "housed" at their properties with 100% occupancy at government expense.
A major problem for right-wing populists is continuously casting such events in overwrought historical, spiritual, or racial terms when the real villains are their own Boomer parents and ...
