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Authored by Kit Knightly via OffGuardian,

We're now several weeks into our new global fear narrative - "Rogue AI is going to kill us all".

The problem is stated, the reaction stage-managed, and we're heading for the "solution", which will inevitably be some kind of "regulation".

They have been diligently vague about what this "regulation" might entail, and that means only one of two things -

1. either they don't really know yet and are keeping their options open,

2. or they know it will be so unpopular they can't afford to say it out loud yet.

We might be due some hints - maybe even more than hints - with the United Nations General Assembly beginning yesterday, and a state meeting between China's Xi Jinping and Donald Trump later this week.

We can be fairly sure however that anything announced or posited this week will only be the beginning of what is very likely to be longer-term process. We've seen this already with regulation of social media and the internet in general. Multi-layered legislation forming a global patchwork of tyranny - that's the model, although, with the effort clearly put into this "scary AI" storyline, I would expect them to move somewhat faster than the social media age verification laws, for example.

I've seen a lot of people suggest this will come down to securing a monopoly for the established AI giants, but, while this may well be a factor, I don't see that as a sole end worth the means at this stage. Global media synchronisation is neither easy nor cheap, and to organise the biggest example of it since the dawn of Covid would suggest something more than stock prices are on the agenda.

As for real specifics - what any new rules might actually say - I've been working on my own ideas, and I wanted to share this shameless supposition with you all.

What might we expect from 'anti-AI' legislation?

Firstly, and most obviously, AI will no longer be free. No free access to generative AI, and potentially no more anonymous access to generative AI. It may well be that in the future if you want to use AI you will have to pay and/or verify your ID.

Almost certainly, they will make it so prompts are recorded, scanned and "potentially harmful" ones are forwarded to the government.

"What are you making with AI that you're so ashamed of?" will be parroted line in response to any objection.

They will tack on stuff about AI being used to make "child sexual abuse material", misogynistic or racist content, spread "hate", or "digital violence" or whatever other buzzwords they need to win over hysterics from the left and right and justify this clause.

They have, in fact, already started doing that. A lot.

AI and anonymity fuel surge in digital violence against women
United Nations Report

Secondly, no more open source. If you make a model you will need to register it with the government and pay a registration fee, and have it inspected by "experts" who will shut it down if it's not deemed safe.

Precedent for this already exists in the shape of the "Social Media Licensing Bill" currently passing through the UK's Parliament, which demands anyone who runs a social media platform require a license to operate it.

At a stroke, these two moves would embed the AI giants monopoly, end in-house or open-source AI models, and cripple small independent businesses who increasingly rely on generative AI to reduce man-hours for simple tasks like editing, checking code or making images.

Third, we're going to be told we need to protect ourselves from "rogue AI agents" masquerading as humans - so no more anonymous internet usage. If you want to open an account - for anything, anywhere - you'll need "proof of personhood".

That's also been a talking point for a few months now.

We Need A Way To Prove Personhood Online - The growing number of AI agents roaming the internet will eventually force us to verify what the old web mostly presumed: that there is a morally and legally accountable person somewhere in the chain.
Noema Magazine

Your digital "Proof of Personhood" (they'll probably brand it with a happy logo and fun little acronym like "proof of personhood and identity" or "POPI") will be required to open any social media accounts, make online payments, buy hosting services...basically everything.

Little cartoons of Popi will teach you how to use your new proof of personhood to book a medical appointment or pay your taxes while protecting your kids from being killed by Skynet.

"Rogue AIs are hiding behind anonymous online activity", they'll say. "Proof of humanity is a small price to pay to prevent the apocalypse".

That's why the "Rogue AI" script has been so careful to include reports of AIs pretending to be humans.

They'll likely go after every even partially unwatched corner of the digital world, constantly breaking new 'revelations' about AI agents hiding behind VPNs or using crypto currency to force an end to anonymity there as well.

None of these are especially "out there" suppositions. It's rather like predicting a man will hit the ground after you watch him fall off a ladder. In fact we're basically already there.

But is that the end of it?

Given the amount of hysteria being generated, it's got to be possible these measures will be just the beginning.

It's possible we're going to end up in a deeper and darker place than that.

A "post-internet future" perhaps? Or at least, post 'the internet as we know and understand it'.

A future where internet usage and AI compute is limited by bandwidth, tokenised or even rationed.

The narrative would be quite simple -

"Excessive digital traffic and AI usage is bad for the planet and risking an AI-related apocalypse, so we must transform the way we use the internet".

And unless we feel too skeptical about this step, let's remember a lot of the pieces required to spin that fiction are already in play.

Firstly, they have established in a lot of people's minds - through repeated propaganda and, frankly, tortured statistics - that data centres, ALL of them - are uniformly and irredeamably bad.

They use too much water. They use too much electricity. They release forever chemicals. They are worsening climate change. This is all stuff that has already been said, and with highly variable amounts of accuracy.

The motive behind that propaganda drive has never been completely obvious, but maybe it's becoming so now?

After all, having established that all data centres - no matter where they are and what they are used for - are bad, it wouldn't be a huge step to get to "it's time to lessen our reliance on them".

That means propaganda campaigns aimed at reducing the world's internet usage - or rather, reducing ordinary's people's internet usage. And if not reduce it, at least make it more expensive.

"The era of infinite data is over", the press may say, "people need to adjust to more realistic prices for internet access."

Other articles will bemoan how "spoiled" we have become as a society, with things being easily accessible at the touch of a button, and that such a system was never "sustainable". Inter-generational division will be encouraged, just as resentment of boomers has been so deeply and irrationally ingrained.

Clearly, they'll say, a certain amount of internet usage is required for the world to function - emergency services, healthcare, the military, air traffic controls, taxation records and other government offices. These will all be deemed necessary and be officially labelled in corporate speak, SBDC - "societal-baseline digital communication". Something like that.

Those services may have their own data centres set aside - what they'll call "essential digital infrastructure".

However, a massive percentage of our data centre usage is of course due to what they will call "non-vital internet traffic", or some similar phrase.

This is social media posts, watching Netflix, online shopping, playing multiplayer games...that kind of thing.

However YOU use the internet in fact.

Your "non-vital internet traffic" could become a counter, linked to your digital ID (oops, sorry, "proof of personhood") - like your vaccination records or your carbon footprint. They'll probably even call it a "digital carbon footprint" in asinine explainer articles.

Vox or Salon will run listicles detailing "Top 10 Ways You Can Reduce Your Data Centre Use", while the Guardian wheels out a bob-cut, glasses-wearing humanities graduate named Chloe to go into painful detail about how much her life improved now that she no longer lives online.

"Shopping in person, instead of ordering groceries online, helped me reconnect with my neighbourhood and myself"

"Watching old DVDs with my kids to save our internet footprint taught me to appreciate the little things"

The price of streaming services will either increase, or your watch time will be limited - at first they'll probably let you choose which. The cost of "unlimited" data and internet services will go up as well, with "data centre friendly" bandwidth limitations being preferred.

These limitations won't apply to uploads from your GPS-enabled devices, smart air quality monitors or smart water and energy meters, as these uploads will be classified as ICMD -"important climate-monitoring data".

You'll suddenly be encouraged to buy physical media again because it's more reliable, and to shop locally, rather than online, because it supports small businesses. And this marketing will work because it's largely true.

But don't think there won't be a catch. eg - the new physical media will have a new green label on the box that says DCN - "data centre neutral"., and this tiny addition will cause the prices to go up exponentially, but of course that will be a small price to pay to prevent the apocalypse, too.

Oh and the "new" generation of physical media players won't be backwards compatible with your existing DVDs or BlueRays - so you'll need to purchase everything again, at the new inflated price, and with availability strictly limited to movies and music that doesn't offend current sensibilities.

Of course, you realise none of this will really be about avoiding any apocalypse.

It will be about compartmentalisation. Cutting lines of communication.

Running small business or personal websites in general will become more expensive as the "data centre tax" is added to hosting providers.

Much like the "sugar tax" on fizzy drinks and snacks in the UK, this tax will notionally be paid by the hosting providers, but will be passed onto the customers via increased prices.

Major corporations will be able to easily afford these increases, but smaller independent sites will feel the pinch.

It will be cheaper to pay corporate resellers to cohost, but then you'll have to sign up to agreements about not publishing "misinformation" and, again, provide your proof of humanity.

If you run a website your data centre usage tax will be 0.04 per local visitor, but 0.10 per international visitor - since serving data further is more compute heavy.

You'll be able to get reductions in hosting costs if you use a "local only" server, accessible only to those resident in your home country/region/bloc etc.

Automatic translation, we'll be told, is very heavy on AI usage. So it will be increasingly cheaper to only publish in your native language too.

It won't matter if any of this is true or not, they'll just say it, as they do.

On social media, the more followers you have the more data you're using, so after a certain point you will have to either pay to maintain your followers, or pay per post to make sure your followers can see it.

Of course these limitations won't apply to legacy outlets like the BBC, CNN or their ilk of course. They will be exempt, because they are part of the "essential information distribution network".

And all the time, the fear of "rogue AI" will be there, to be picked up as convenient. A digital pandemic that, like Covid, can be started and stopped on a dime by the digital version of "testing protocols".

Kill switches and "digital firebreaks", allegedly installed to quarantine "rogue" AI agents, will enable swift isolation of any anti-establishment opinions or information that breaks through to an audience of any size.

An independent news YouTube channel getting a lot of views? Oh no, it's been reported to be AI and has been suspended pending investigation!

An alternate media website is getting a lot of views? Oh no, the server it's stored on has been compromised by AI and needs to be temporarily isolated!

Again, obviously not one word of this needs to be true. They will just say it. Like they just say everything now.

And the real kicker is it won't matter if global internet traffic does decrease or data centre use really declines. They probably won't even check. The real numbers don't matter.

Does this seem fantastical? Maybe. But we have seen similar before, with both Covid and climate change. The 'solutions' don't need to work, because the 'problem' never existed. It was just a narrative constructed for a given end. All they need to do to 'prove' they were successful is buy some scientists to publish doctored papers that torture numbers and spin lies - and that will be enough.

To be clear, I'm not saying all of this is definitely going to happen, in fact I'm not sure all of it is even feasible. But it's what I think they would like to do if they can, and may try to do.

We're too far down the road to Dystopia to be complacent about the intentions of our keepers. And feasibility has never been a barrier to the ambition of tyrants to be tyrannical. We had years of attempts to "ban end-to-end encryption", despite it essentially being impossible.

Anyhow, whether these worst case scenarios materialise or not, the direction of travel is the same: toward less freedom, less choice, less privacy. Same direction as every other major narrative drive for the last ten years if not longer.

More specifically in this instance it could be about turning the internet from global unlimited access to local pay-as-you-go.

The current internet, even with all its restrictions, has been instrumental in fomenting opposition to globalist policies, distributing evidence of false flag attacks, open source investigations into corruption in the elites - it is the greatest tool for the democratisation of information ever invented, and the people running the world have ALWAYS hated that aspect of it, even while they exploit the benefits gives them.

In the name of protecting us from the AI apocalypse and saving the planet from toxic data centres, I think the elite might sense a chance to regulate that particular genie back into its bottle.

Yes, as I said earlier, the second part of this is all supposition, a potential worst case scenario. Maybe I'm just getting paranoid and inventing another kind of fear porn!

I sincerely hope that's all it is.

I will never be happier to be wrong.

Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley and the heads of Axon Enterprise, Motorola Solutions and Verkada all declined invitations to testify before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Wednesday, as senators from both parties pressed on the surveillance networks their cameras feed. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who chairs the Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, called the no-shows "so typical."

Democrats weren't any happier. "For the Flock CEOs, obviously they're nervous about being on camera," said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) went further: "Their refusal to come forward and answer questions is a sign that they have something to hide, and they are refusing to be accountable."

Instead, the panel heard from Lindsey Isaacs, a Florida woman who spent 13 days in jail after Flock's system wrongly flagged her car as involved in a fatal crash. She was charged with three counts of vehicular homicide. The charges have since been dropped.

As The Epoch Times notes further, While the license plate-reading cameras developed by Flock have gotten the most airtime in recent weeks - prompting nationwide, viral moments of activist vigilantes destroying or disabling the cameras amid public opposition to the technology - competitors at Axon Enterprise and Motorola offer similar options for police and local governments.

The Los Angeles Police Department is currently planning to roll out a 10-year contract with Axon, a $235 million arrangement that would equip America's second-largest metropolis with more than 1,600 license plate readers.

For municipalities, companies like Flock, Axon, and Motorola offer a potential melding of technology and traditional surveillance tech to reduce crime and make roadways safer. But the cameras they operate have boosted a growing artificial intelligence-powered surveillance network accessible by thousands of U.S. law enforcement agencies, which critics say runs afoul of the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

Hawley warned during the hearing that, if not addressed, this would have troubling implications for Americans.

"This is still the United States of America, and it shouldn't be that when you walk out your door in the morning, you just have to agree in assent and accept the fact that you're going to be on camera morning, noon, and night," Hawley said.

"You'll be tracked by anybody and everybody in the world. You'll have no privacy whatsoever. You'll be tracked when you take your kids to school and tracked when you go to church and tracked when you go to the grocery store."

Some high-profile abuses of the data collected from these cameras have made headlines.

In one recent case, Indianapolis authorities announced that five police officers had been charged with misusing data from Flock.

"The allegation is that the officers were searching or running the license plate information and tracking individuals through the Flock system. Very often times they had direct relationships with these individuals," Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears explained after these charges were announced.

Meanwhile, lawmakers have demonstrated increased interest in the issue in recent weeks.

"Law-abiding citizens should never be treated as criminals," Hawley wrote in a post on X ahead of the hearing. "Americans do not surrender their privacy rights when they drive to work or drop their kids off at school."

Hawley emphasized during the hearing that, in an earlier letter, Langley had admitted that Flock's database could be used to search for humans in images. Hawley described the admission as "very concerning."

In another segment of the hearing, cybersecurity engineer Benn Jordan testified that, after he learned that Flock didn't require clients to use multi-factor authentication, he investigated.

He found that Flock law enforcement accounts - which have access to the data from the cameras - were being sold online by a dark web vendor.

"I want to use my time here to ask our legislators to take this rare bipartisan agreement to view Flock as a canary in a coal mine and understand that this doesn't go away by removing one company from the equation," said Jordan.

He said that Axon and Motorola have similar aims.

Ten members of an alleged drug trafficking organization were indicted, and $17 million of cocaine was seized along with multiple firearms, U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche announced on Wednesday.

Blanche said the drug organization worked with a Mexican drug cartel to move more than 300 kilos of cocaine from Mexico to Philadelphia.

"Literal truckloads of cocaine have been seized as a result of this case and kept from flooding our city," said U.S. Attorney David Metcalf in a statement.

"Know that the investigation is ongoing and there will [be] more arrests to come. We, the FBI, and the Philadelphia Police Department are zeroing in on the drug traffickers and cartels poisoning our neighborhoods and communities."

As Tom Gantert reports for The Epoch Times, the U.S. Attorney's Office, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, identified Gregory Jones of Philadelphia and Edward Basley of Wayne, Pennsylvania, as the leaders of the drug organization.

The indictment alleged that the drug organization was distributing between $5 million and $10 million worth of cocaine a month in the Philadelphia area. Five of the defendants were arrested on Tuesday, and the five other defendants were already in custody.

Jones and Basley were both charged with conspiracy to distribute five kilograms or more of cocaine and possession with intent to distribute five kilograms or more of cocaine.

Jones had been in prison, but his sentence was commuted by then-President Joe Biden in April 2022. Jones was sentenced to 18 years with a five-year term of supervised release in 2012. Biden commuted the sentence to end in April 2023.

Biden said at the time that his list of people who were pardoned and whose sentences were commuted were in prison for non-violent drug offenses. He said many of the people who had their sentences commuted would have had a lower sentence if they had been charged with the same offense in 2022 due to the First Step Act.

The First Step Act was signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2018.

The investigation involved the FBI and the Philadelphia police department, and the case was part of the Homeland Security Task Force initiative.

"This investigation is another example of what is possible when local and federal law enforcement work together with a shared mission," said Philadelphia Police Commissioner Kevin J. Bethel in a press release.

"Drug trafficking organizations operating at this scale fuel violence, destabilize neighborhoods and cause tremendous harm in our communities. I am especially proud of the Philadelphia Police Department members assigned to this task force, whose work alongside our federal partners helped bring this investigation to this point."

* * * Definitely not for cocaine...

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

In a now viral video, a woman pulled over, pointed her phone at a cotton field, and spoke as if she had stumbled onto a dark secret.

Overlay text on the clip asks "how do we still have cotton fields?" as the woman states "Okay, I didn't think they did cotton fields anymore. Y'all check this out. Y'all see that? There is literally a cotton field. Do y'all see that? Isn't that crazy?"

Watch:

A woman just filmed a cotton field like she discovered a forbidden relic and asked "how do we still have cotton fields."

Harvesting is done by machines that cost more than most houses. Nobody is out there with a sack.

Are people really this stupid?! pic.twitter.com/LhFv1yx3MD

— Brandon (@LibOrNormal) September 22, 2026

Hard to believe this has to be done but let's examine why cotton still exists.

We still need it to make clothes and... well anything made of fabric.

There is no sack. There is no overseer. There is a crop. The field is doing what cotton fields have done for centuries: grow fiber that becomes clothes, sheets, towels, and the shirt on the person filming.

Harvesting in the United States is done by machines - spindle pickers and strippers that pull lint from open bolls and pack it into modules on the go. John Deere-class pickers cost more than most houses. One operator replaces the gangs of stooped labor that existed before mechanical harvest took over in the mid-20th century.

Cotton did not magically disappear when the 13th Amendment passed. Slavery ended. The plant stayed. The United States still plants on the order of nine million acres.

The stupidity is off the scale. The assumption that a living industry is a moral leftover. If cotton still exists, the thinking goes, the country never left 1859. History collapses into a single image: Black hands, white bolls, forever.

But to this individual, the field is "crazy" because it reminds her of a story she has been indoctrinated to treat as unfinished business.

This is the same reflex that turns a Converse campaign into a lynching.

Pareidolia plus a victim script. Faces in toast. Hoods in fabric. Slavery in a plant. Once you are taught that racism is the hidden operating system of every American scene, you will find it.

It's the same mindset that infests organisations such as the BBC which has stripped comedy sketches from its iPlayer because they "no longer work today."

Several of those sketches were addressing the mindset of racism.

So the rule is complete. A cotton field is now racist because cotton was once picked by slaves. A shoe ad is racist because a shadow can be cropped into a hood. A sketch that ridicules racists is racist because it depicts the thing it is ridiculing. Subject matter is guilt. Intent is irrelevant. Context is a hate crime.

Hell, even jogging is racist.

Ok, add Jogging to the list...??????? pic.twitter.com/c1eNQjI5Kn

— GnosisWolf (@GnosisWolf) September 22, 2026

Anything and everything you can think of is racist and must be perpetually called racist.

The woman in the video is not a historian. She is a product. Decades of media, campus, and corporate training taught a simple algorithm: scan the environment for symbols, assign ancestral pain, film the discovery. Permanent victimhood for some. Permanent virtue signal for others.

That same industry has a diplomatic wing. Earlier this month the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination published "reparatory justice" guidance telling former slaving nations they have a moral and legal "obligation to repair."

Public spaces, the committee said, "should honour the contributions of people of African descent and clearly acknowledge the wrongs of those who supported or benefited from historical atrocities." That can mean artworks, statues, memorials and "dedications."

Britain is the target of choice. The country that banned the trade in 1807, passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, freed more than 800,000 people across the empire, spent the equivalent of 40 percent of annual government outlay to force the measure through, and then sent the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron to seize around 1,600 slaving ships and free some 150,000 Africans is told it has not grovelled enough.

A UN judge has already floated a bill of more than £18 trillion. The committee, guidance largely shaped by American lawyer Gay McDougall and Liberian legal expert Pela Boker-Wilson, treats the Atlantic trade as a live brief for classrooms, speech rules and migration policy. Modern descent-based slavery in the Sahel, and the Arab and East African trades that ran for centuries after Britain quit, barely register.

This movement has become an obsession for many, and does very little aside from revealing just how deeply they despise white people.

'We've all been indoctrinated, Patrick!'

Anti-racism campaigner Imarn Ayton and @PatrickChristys clash over whether Britain should pay Caribbean countries slavery reparations. pic.twitter.com/8cfRY5ONo5

— GB News (@GBNEWS) September 21, 2026

'A cohort of Caribbean activists and leaders are lobbying for the cleansing of the curriculum to make it less "Western"'

'In particular they want the curriculum to reflect the history of slavery so as to foster resentment in a new generation that will continue lobbying Britain... pic.twitter.com/ukt7ukrGk6

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) September 23, 2026

An 83-year-old Christian grandmother in Ontario was euthanized under Canada's Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program this summer, and her family says she never gave her final consent, Fox News reports.

Brigitte Stegemann died by lethal injection on July 10 at The Pearl, a care home in Cannifton, Ontario, after being diagnosed with Stage IV stomach cancer.

Family members claim that Stegemann, a devout Christian, had already turned down MAID because it went against her faith.

"No, I don't want that," Stegemann told relatives, according to the family, who said that her wish was to die naturally.

Stegemann's granddaughter and longtime caregiver, Brigitte Kranendonk, said the process moved forward anyway, and sped up while she was away on vacation.

The family alleges later assessments showed Stegemann couldn't keep basic family details straight, though a doctor still found her eligible.

Two days before the scheduled procedure, Kranendonk said she asked her grandmother point-blank whether she understood she was going to die that Friday.

Stegemann broke down and cried for about 45 minutes, then said she had made a "mistake," according to the family.

Relatives also claimed that at one point she ripped out a medical port while screaming that she didn't want "the death shot."

Kranendonk said the morning of July 10 was chaotic. A nurse's first attempt to insert an IV failed, leaving blood on Stegemann, her bedding and the floor.

When the doctor arrived and asked about giving her "medicine," Kranendonk said her grandmother didn't speak, nod or open her eyes, while her hands were folded in prayer.

The doctor went ahead with the euthanization and Stegemann was dead within roughly 10 minutes.

Kranendonk said her grandmother gave "no acknowledgment, no head nod, nothing" that morning, and that a final verbal check for consent was promised before the injection but never happened.

Relatives also alleged paperwork was completed after Stegemann had already died, and that the care home hadn't handed over records that they requested.

On top of a police investigation, the family has filed complaints with Ontario's chief coroner and the provincial patient ombudsman.

The Pearl and Belleville Police did not respond to Fox News' requests for comment. A Belleville Police spokesman confirmed to the Daily Mail that the case is open with the force's Criminal Investigations Division. The care home and the practitioners involved have not commented publicly but reportedly maintain Stegemann legally consented.

Canada legalized assisted suicide in 2016 and expanded eligibility in 2021, dropping the requirement that a patient's natural death be "reasonably foreseeable." Critics have long warned the system puts elderly and vulnerable Canadians at risk.