Society's ChildS


Pistol

Dozens of cops in tactical gear 'aggressively' show up at California church on Easter, pastor now facing fine or up to six months in jail

pastor arrested easter
A California pastor is facing a fine of $1,000, or potentially even six months in jail, after approximately 40 deputies in tactical gear showed up to his Easter service and accused him of hiding congregants from law enforcement.

The Merced County Sheriff claims that they were tipped off about dozens of worshippers violating the state's stay-at-home order and attending Easter services at Iglesia De Jesus Cristo Palabra Miel on Weaver Avenue.

During services, law enforcement said that congregants parked out of view and the doors to the church were locked. Pastor Fernando Aguas claims that they had simply parked in the back to avoid problems.

Comment: See also:


Sheriff

Four Michigan Sheriffs say they won't enforce Governor Gretchen Whitmer's totalitarian orders

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer
Four sheriffs in northern Michigan declared Wednesday they would not be enforcing recent executive orders signed by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer implemented to slow the spread of the novel Wuhan coronavirus in the state.

Citing concerns over violating civil liberties, sheriffs Mike Borkovich, Ted Schendel, Ken Falk, and Kim Cole who protect counties along Lake Michigan in the northwest part of the mitten said in a joint statement that the governor "has created a vague framework of emergency laws that only confuse Michigan citizens."

"As a result, we will not have strict enforcement of these orders," the sheriffs said. "We will deal with every case as an individual situation and apply common sense in assessing the apparent violation... We believe that we are the last line of defense in protecting your civil liberties."

Comment: See also:


Alarm Clock

By the time we notice we're hungry, it may be too late

farmers Florida 1947
Future Farmers of America picking tomatoes: Palmetto, Florida, 1947.
"[A]s the top U.S. watermelon-producing state prepares for harvest, Reuters reports, "many of the workers needed to collect the crop are stuck in Mexico .... Without the workers crops could rot in fields throughout the country," starting in Florida and California where major harvests begin in April and May.

As you can probably guess, the problem stems from the COVID-19 panic. The US State Department has halted routine visa applications and consulates are limiting both staff numbers and staff contact with applicants. That's making it difficult for the quarter million migrant workers who normally pick America's crops to get here and get to work.

Most Americans aren't hungry. Yet.

Comment: If governments keep these unjustified lockdowns in place in the face of starving their citizens, they truly reveal themselves for what they are: psychopaths.

See also:


Attention

India's best shot at dealing with coronavirus: Anders Tegnell's (Swedish) approach

sweden
Sweden is building up herd immunity that will make the virus a trifle in the macro sense while the rest of the world is hoping if they stop normal life a common cold coronavirus might somehow magically go away
Our party wants the best plan for India, a plan that can deal with the worst eventuality. We don't want plans that are based on day dreams. Therefore, over the past month I have repeatedly recommended a staggered herd immunity approach, based on scientific and economic analysis.

The first worst-case eventuality we need to address is this: that a vaccine is not discovered or discovered after many years. (If it is found earlier, we can rapidly change plans).

Why should we be so pessimistic about the prospect of a vaccine? Some basic facts can help.

Four coronaviruses commonly infect humans: OC43 and 229E (discovered in the 1990s) and HKU1 and NL63 (discovered a decade ago). These are part of a group of 200 odd (and distinct) viruses that cause the "common cold" for which, as we all know, there is no vaccine.

In addition, two other coronaviruses can infect us: SARS and MERS. For these, as well, there is no vaccine despite scientists working on it for years. Instead, we know that "Early efforts to develop a SARS vaccine in animal trials were plagued by a phenomenon known as vaccine-induced enhancement, in which recipients exhibit worse symptoms after being injected". Basically, a bad vaccine can kill far more of us than the virus itself.

Briefcase

ACLU files historic lawsuit to stop surveillance planes above Baltimore

aerial surveillance program
"If this wide-area aerial surveillance program is allowed to move forward, we can expect mass surveillance to spread in cities across the country."

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a lawsuit in an attempt to stop the city of Baltimore from rolling out a disturbing aerial surveillance program.

The ACLU filed the suit on behalf of a group of Baltimore community activists who have raised concerns about the introduction of a controversial technology known as wide-area aerial surveillance which involves stationing an aircraft equipped with ultra-high-resolution cameras over a city to track all visible pedestrians and vehicles within that city.

The ACLU writes:
"Imagine a day in the future when everyone, from the moment they step outside their home, has to live with the knowledge that their every movement is being recorded by powerful cameras circling in the skies above. Not just where they work, shop, eat and drink, and whose homes they visit, but details about their political, religious, sexual, and medical lives — all captured and stored in databases without a warrant and available to law enforcement upon request.

That day is here."

Comment: And in other recent surveillance state developments:


Handcuffs

Australian sentenced to month in jail for violating quarantine to see girlfriend

Handcuffs
Australian national Jonathan David, 35, was jailed for a month on Tuesday for reportedly sneaking out of a hotel and breaking quarantine measures to visit his girlfriend. He is the first person to be imprisoned in Australia for violating COVID-19-related lockdown measures.

According to a report by AFP, David was arrested earlier this month after opening a fire escape and sneaking out of a hotel in Perth, the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia.
On Tuesday, David told Perth's Magistrates Court that he first broke the country's lockdown laws to get food and then violated the rules once again, just a few hours later, to visit his girlfriend, whom he said he missed.
Although David managed to get by hotel staff members, he was caught escaping via the fire exit on video surveillance.

Comment: Nanny State totalitarianism creeper ever closer to its goal of total control over your life.


Fire

Anti-surveillance activists claim they set fire outside German institute developing Covid-19 tracking app

nurse with face mask
© AFP / Pool / Frank RumpenhorstFILE PHOTO: A nurse during a visit to the university clinics Giessen and Marburg in Giessen, Germany, on April 14, 2020
Left-wing activists aiming to prevent mass surveillance via the 'Corona App' claim they caused a fire outside Berlin's telecommunications institute, which is developing software designed to track the spread of the disease.

Several power and telecommunication cables were badly damaged during the fire at a construction site in Berlin's Charlottenburg district on Tuesday morning, outside the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications. The fire caused a temporary power outage on adjacent streets, and police are investigating the incident as a suspected arsonist attack.

A letter has since been sent to a number of German media outlets and has appeared online, in which the left-wing 'Volcano Group' claims responsibility, saying they targeted the nearby institute, also known as the Heinrich Hertz Institute (IHH), which is currently working on an app to track the spread of Covid-19.

The attack was committed to "stop any further weakening of fundamental rights and the expansion of surveillance measures," the lengthy letter said, alleging that, in the current circumstances, it is impossible to guarantee that the 'Corona App' will not be used for spying on German citizens.

Comment: The activists - assuming they are responsible for the fire and with the below in mind - are right to worry about the dangers of tracking apps, but trying to burn a building down isn't the right course of action for stopping the tracking app from being created, used, or abused. From RT:
A German app developer has warned that the Covid-19 pandemic gives Silicon Valley tech giants perfect cover to suck up personal data. However, while the government may intervene, the tech firms aren't known for listening.

Apple and Google unveiled an app last week that uses bluetooth connections to trace the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus. Put simply, the app tracks whether a smartphone user has come in contact with another, infected, user. Similar apps rolled out in South Korea and Singapore have been credited with arresting the spread of the deadly pathogen.

In Europe, the rollout of such apps has been met with privacy concerns. "We do not think it is the best solution that Google and Apple own the server on which all the contacts plus the medical status of citizens around the world are uploaded," Julian Teicke, a leader of Germany's Healthy Together startup initiative, told Reuters on Tuesday.

"What we need is an independent party that allows governments some kind of control over what happens with this medical and contact data," he added.

The data collected will not be stored on a physical server in a physical location, but in cloud storage, where the firms insist it will be scrubbed of all personal signifiers and deleted after 14 days. By contrast, a German led platform — The Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) platform — would store data in a centralized location, and would comply with Europe's GDPR data protection laws. Several European countries, including France, Germany and Ireland, are developing apps on the PEPP-PT platform.

However, almost every single smartphone in Europe uses Google's Android or Apple's iOS operating systems, and the two companies have said that the contact-tracing functionality will eventually be built into these operating systems by default.

Apple and Google have promised that this tracking technology will be remotely deactivated once the pandemic subsides, and until then will function on a strictly "opt-in" basis. Europe's GDPR law holds them to this.

But Silicon Valley has a spotty track record when it comes to privacy. Apple presents itself as a responsible handler of user data and has famously refused to allow the FBI to access the phones of terror suspects. Yet, behind the scenes, the company reportedly dropped plans to let users encrypt backups of their phone data after it was pressured by FBI agents. Given that multiple governments have criminalized the breaking of quarantine measures, it remains possible that Apple's contact-tracing data could be used to identify lawbreakers.

Google, on the other hand, is a data-hungry 'Big Brother,' with capabilities beyond Orwell's wildest dreams. Everything you've ever searched for on any of your devices is recorded and stored by Google — every web page visited, every photograph and message sent through apps, and every file stored or document edited on Google Drive, and every journey tracked by Google Maps.

Google says it's not associating the data with you, as a person — instead, it's linked to your "advertising ID," and never shared unless you want it to be. Or unless a government agency requests that Google turn it over. This happened 165,000 times in the first half of last year, with Google granting three quarters of these requests.

Crucially, the firm was recently revealed to have gathered detailed medical records — including names, hospital records, diagnoses and lab results — on millions of Americans without their consent. Though Google insists the operation was legal, it nevertheless tried to keep it under wraps for over a year.

If data collection in the age of Covid-19 is to be an inevitability, lawmakers and citizens must now decide who they trust to handle that data: the old Big Brother of government or the new data kingpins of Silicon Valley. If the latter is chosen, then privacy advocates would do well to look at these firms' histories, particularly with regard to sensitive medical data.



Bad Guys

'People abandoned to die of hunger & disease': France summons Chinese envoy over criticism of West's response to Covid-19 pandemic

French rescue workers
© Reuters / Christian HartmannFILE PHOTO: French rescue workers in protective suits carry a patient on a stretcher as the country faces an aggressive Covid-19 outbreak.
Paris has summoned its Chinese envoy after the embassy published a blistering critique of the West's response to the Covid-19 crisis, accusing leaders of failing to act and abandoning vulnerable citizens to death and starvation.

"Certain publicly voiced opinions by representatives of the Chinese Embassy in France are not in line with the quality of the bilateral relations between our two countries," Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said in a statement late on Tuesday, calling on Ambassador Lu Shaye to answer for an article published on the Chinese Embassy website over the weekend.

Entitled 'Restoring distorted facts,' the lengthy post - which listed no author - tore into the US and European governments for their handling of the pandemic, while defending Beijing from accusations of concealing information and of a sluggish response.
In the West, we have seen politicians tearing themselves apart to recover votes; advocate herd immunity, thus abandoning their citizens alone in the face of the viral massacre.

Attention

Best of the Web: German lawyer arrested and sent to PSYCH WARD after calling for resistance to 'unconstitutional' Covid-19 lockdown


Comment: Holy Geebus. The globalists and their authoritarian followers aren't kidding around. They really mean to LOCK IT ALL DOWN...


Beate Bahner psychiatric ward coronavirus protest germany
Beate Bahner
A German medical law specialist who launched a rigorous fight against government-mandated coronavirus lockdown rules was taken to a mental health facility after expressing fears she was being targeted by 'killers.'

Beate Bahner had repeatedly claimed that measures taken by Berlin to stem the spread of Covid-19 threaten nothing less than the nation's constitutional order itself. The lawyer, from the German city of Heidelberg, was forced to spend a couple of days in a local psychiatric ward after her encounter with police went terribly wrong.

She had already been under police investigation over "calls for an illegal action" after urging Germans to go on a nationwide demonstration against the lockdown last Sunday - in open defiance of the ban on public gatherings.

Comment: The UK Column has a more in-depth account of Ms. Bahner's anti-lockdown activities, and her version of her incarceration:
Beate Bahner, in the southern German state of Baden-Württemberg, has a 25-year career and has won three cases before the Federal Constitutional Court (German Supreme Court) in the domain of unlawful infringements of the right to practise one's profession. She has written five books on medical law, most recently an analysis of the 2016 federal act to tackle corruption in the healthcare system.

On Friday 3 April 2020, Ms Bahner issued a press release decrying the German government's Coronavirus measures as "flagrantly unconstitutional, infringing to an unprecedented extent many of the fundamental rights of German citizens". The statement argued that the small minority of the public that was at risk of serious harm in the event of contracting Covid-19 could be far more suitably protected by means of targeted measures based on the principle of adult responsibility for safeguarding one's own health.

[...]

Violent committal to psychiatric clinic

On Easter Monday, a recording was uploaded of a calm 12½-minute voicemail left by Ms Bahner for her sister, describing a massively brutal swoop on her home on Easter Sunday evening (12 April). The voice in the recording matches a previous video recording of Ms Bahner (ironically, one in which she describes nursing liability law). In the voicemail, Ms Bahner recounts:
I went into the garage and found a car following me suspiciously. After standing in front of my car for ten minutes, I sensed something was not right and ran back out of the garage. Stupidly, I didn't run into the house, because my secretary had gone to get her car on Voss-strasse and she just didn't show up again ... I asked a passing car to call the police for me. They simply kept refusing to [respond] for five minutes, and then I realised it had been a huge mistake to call the police, because at the moment I'm Number One Enemy of the State.

When the police did arrive, I told them I felt threatened. They brought the handcuffs out and pushed me to the ground with massive force. They kept me sitting in their car for ten minutes with my hands cuffed behind my back, then they drove me around the corner to the psychiatric clinic. There were four police officers there, three nurses, and a doctor, though she only arrived ten minutes later.

I asked to be allowed to sit down and was shown to a bench. Then I asked to have the handcuffs taken off, since it was actually I who had requested police protection. But instead, I was thrown to the floor again, having my head hurled onto the stone floor from a metre (3 ft) height, which nobody reacted to. Then they asked me whether I wanted a face mask, which of course I declined.

Because I refused to move, they physically carried me to the doctor, who asked me "why I felt threatened", even though they all know perfectly well who I am. I was told I would not be given a lawyer.
She goes on to describe in the voicemail her unfamiliarity with the psychiatric facility to which she was taken, even though she is a local lawyer who apparently had to visit clients in that clinic in the past:
Then I was forced to spend the night lying on the floor in some high-security Guantanamo psychiatric clinic, which I didn't recognise; it's been renovated. There was no toilet, no sink, though they did allow me water, and there was a bell I could ring, though they ignored it after the third time I pressed it.
After a further ten minutes of description of how Ms Bahner was "upgraded" from the floor of an isolation cell to a proper furnished room with good nurses, she ends the voicemail to her sister with the observation:
I have been held here for 20 hours now. If people don't finally wake up, this is going to turn into the worst régime of terror ever ... We are being tyrannised by evil, evil, evil forces. Last night, I was petrified of being killed, of being forceably injected. I am fearful of being disappeared ... Because I had been without a mobile phone at the time I was arrested, I had no way of contacting anyone ... I have a summons for Wednesday [15 April] because I allegedly breached Article 111 of the Penal Code, "Incitement to Criminal Acts". I called upon people to demonstrate! Freedom of speech was the most fundamental constitutional right in Germany, and in the space of three months it has become a criminal act.
Ms Bahner's presence at the Klinik für Allgemeine Psychiatrie on Voss-strasse in Heidelberg, a university clinic, was confirmed on Tuesday 14 April in a telephone call by journalist Hagen Grell. The clinic told him that it had put out a public statement on the case and refused to allow him to speak to Ms Bahner, but suggested that if he were able to obtain her mobile telephone number, he would be able to call her directly.

The detention has also been reported by local Heidelberg media, regional media and a national news source. Ms Bahner's interview for "incitement to commit criminal acts" is reportedly scheduled for 1 pm on Wednesday 15 April at the K6 Heidelberg Criminal Police Department on Römerstrasse.

On Tuesday 14 April, Attorney W. Schmitz wrote to the German Federal Bar Association that it should take up Ms Bahner's case, if only because the Psychiatric Treatment Act did not in his understanding justify the committal of a person to an institution on the "alleged perception of a police officer" that she appeared confused. He added:
I should not have to add that Ms Bahner's claims of very grave abuse have very untoward connotations of the darkest chapters of German history. The mere fact that she claimed to have been so badly abused was what prompted me to write to you.

Ms Bahner is in the company of over 50 well-known experts in criticising the nationwide lockdown; I would be glad to furnish you with a list of their names.

If it really is the case that lawyers critical of government measures can now be intimidated using the state legal apparatus or psychiatry, and can be professionally and socially destroyed, then it is five minutes to midnight in this country.
Confinement of whistleblowers in psychiatric institutions, an old Soviet technique, has previously been reported by UK Column from Lancashire (in our most viewed ever video, an interview with social worker Carol Woods, who we understand has recently been released but remains at threat from persecutors); from North Yorkshire (in the Hofschröer case, extending to Germany and Austria); from Nottinghamshire (the case of Melanie Shaw, who is now being well looked after in another institution); and from Cornwall (the case of Emma, a mother who had reported apparent sexual grooming going on at her child's primary school).

UPDATE: A statement on Ms Bahner's website of Wednesday 15 April indicates that she was released from psychiatric committal the previous evening. In the early afternoon of 15 April, dozens of protestors rallied in front of the Heidelberg Criminal Police building where Ms Bahner had just been interviewed for alleged incitement to commit criminal offences. Ms Bahner told the assembled crowd that she had been given a date, apparently for a further interview.

Ms Bahner's statement ends:
Beate Bahner requires no legal representation, since practically the whole legal profession and the whole judicial system has utterly failed in the past two weeks, thereby contributing to the abolition of the rule of law and the lightning-quick setting-up of the most monstrous and appalling régime of injustice that the world has ever seen.
A statement of 14 April by the Heidelberg Public Prosecutor, the body's second press statement on Ms Bahner, announces that her prosecution by criminal police and the State Security Department is continuing and insists that the criminal proceedings against her have nothing to with "either the psychiatric committal of the accused or any other use of force by law enforcement".



Yoda

"If Julian Assange is extradited, it's the end of the rule of law in the West" - interview with former MEP and lawyer Eva Joly

eva joly assange lawyer
© Mathieu Cugnot | European Union 2017Eva Joly
Last March, one of our journalists had the opportunity to speak with Eva Joly, a lawyer and former Member of Parliament, about the details of the Assange case, as she herself knows the main protagonist personally. The subjects of their exchange included the hunt for the whistleblower, his revelations, his conditions of detention and his trial. And in parallel, the questions raised in terms of freedom of information, human rights and democracy. Exclusive interview.

Julian Assange has made a name for himself by exposing damning atrocities during the US invasion and war in Iraq and Afghanistan - two wars fought with lies - including the publication in April 2010 of the video Collateral Murder, in which two Reuters reporters and several civilians were shot at from an American Apache helicopter. In the same year, WikiLeaks, of which he is the founder and spokesman, released hundreds of thousands of military and diplomatic documents relating to war crimes and acts of torture committed by the US military.