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Kansas is at a Crossroads as Raids, Bills increase the High Cost of Criminalizing THC

Kansas raids dozens of hemp shops while considering legalization bills that could generate $20-50 million annually. The state arrests nearly 5,000 people yearly for cannabis possession at a cost of $7-54 million in criminal justice expenses—money that could fund schools, roads, or treatment programs instead. Meanwhile, legislators debate three competing approaches: medical cannabis (SB 294), adult-use regulation (HB 2405), or tighter hemp restrictions (SB 292). The math is clear: prohibition costs Kansas taxpayers millions while generating zero revenue and saddling thousands with criminal records that reduce lifetime earnings. The question isn't whether Kansas can afford to reform—it's whether Kansas can afford not to.

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From Robert Charles to ICE: Echoes of State Violence and Resistance in America

The summer heat bore down on New Orleans that July night in 1900 when gunfire first cracked the air. Robert Charles, a Black laborer who had dared to sit on a porch in a white neighborhood, would be dead within four days—his body riddled with bullets, then mutilated by a mob drunk on the kind of rage that newspapers cultivated and police sanctioned. Before he fell, Charles killed several officers in what he surely understood would be his final stand. The city erupted. White mobs roamed the streets hunting Black residents. At least 28 people died, most of them Black civilians guilty of nothing more than existing in the wrong place during a wave of sanctioned terror. The rhetoric that summer was familiar: dangerous criminals, threats to public safety, the necessity of force. Charles was not portrayed as a man defending himself against a violent arrest in a society that offered him no legal protection. He was a monster to be exterminated, and the Black community that harbored him deserved collective punishment. More than a century later, the same language of fear and control echoes through the detention centers and deportation raids of today.

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How Cotton, Gold, and Greed Fueled a Continental Crime

In 1830 the United States signed away its own credibility with the Indian Removal Act, a feel‑good promise of “humanity and justice” that devolved into bayonets, disease‑ridden stockades, and death marches stretching from the Smokies to the Oklahoma prairie. The article you’re about to read punches through the textbook euphemisms—“westward expansion,” “voluntary exchange”—to expose the real machinery of expulsion: Andrew Jackson’s political street‑fight in Congress, forged treaties written in languages the signers could not read, and private contractors who made fortunes feeding tribes rancid bacon on thousand‑mile treks. From Osceola’s guerrilla war in the Everglades to the frozen sandbars where Choctaw children died waiting for ferries that never came, the piece follows each “civilized” tribe’s road into exile and tracks the fallout right up to modern flashpoints like McGirt v. Oklahoma and the Standing Rock pipeline standoff. It is a hard look at how a republic can celebrate liberty with one hand while erasing whole nations with the other—and why the ghosts under Highway 62 still keep the receipts.

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Betting Culture Created a Business Empire

From colonial footraces to modern mobile betting apps, American sports have always existed primarily as vehicles for gambling. This comprehensive history traces how betting culture didn't just influence professional sports—it created them. Through horse racing's 19th-century boom, baseball's Black Sox scandal, basketball's point-shaving crisis, and the explosive growth of DraftKings and FanDuel, the throughline is unmistakable: organized sports in America serve wagering, and wagering funds sports.

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First They Came for My Milk, Then They Came for My Chicken

Budget-driven cutbacks have altered two federal pillars of U.S. food safety. The Food and Drug Administration has paused its proficiency-testing program for laboratories that certify Grade “A” milk, leaving states and processors without a federal benchmark for detecting pathogens and drug residues. At the same time, the Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service has withdrawn a rule that would have treated high-risk Salmonella strains in raw poultry as adulterants, ending the first major attempt in a decade to lower infection rates linked to chicken and turkey. The second Trump administration cites regulatory streamlining; industry groups welcome the moves. Public-health officials warn that raw-milk illnesses and multidrug-resistant Salmonella strains remain significant threats, especially as independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaigns to legalize interstate raw-milk sales. Absent federal backstops, states, processors and consumers must shoulder more responsibility for keeping milk and poultry safe.