Society's ChildS


Stormtrooper

COVID-1984:Tennessee patient arrested after leaving fairgrounds quarantine

Natalie Neysa Alund and Brett Kelman
The Tennessean
Fri, 08 May 2020 17:44 UTC
nashville fairgrounds
© Daniel MeigsThe Fairgrounds Nashville, Tennessee
A coronavirus patient was arrested Thursday after prosecutors said he jumped a fence and fled the Nashville Fairgrounds, where health officials are using enforceable quarantines in an attempt to control an outbreak at an emergency homeless shelter.

This appears to be the first case in Nashville of police making an arrest to enforce coronavirus restrictions enacted by the local government.

The Tennessean is not naming the man to protect his privacy and because the charge is a misdemeanor.

According to an arrest affidavit, a 39-year-old man was taken to the Nashville Fairgrounds on Monday and placed under quarantine by the Metro Nashville Public Health Department because he tested positive for the coronavirus.

Comment: Local news outlet WKRN further reports:
Metro police say 39-year-old Randle Kirkley has been charged with escape after jumping the fence at the Nashville Fairgrounds, where he was being quarantined for COVID-19.
39-year-old Randle Kirkley covid-19 quarantine tennessee
39-year-old Randle Kirkley
Police say the man arrived to the fairgrounds May 4, after testing positive for COVID-19. The fairgrounds are currently being used to house the homeless during the pandemic.

Police say the man jumped the fence and led them on a chase heading north on Nolensville Pike. He was arrested when they caught up to him at the Nashville City Cemetery.

Kirkley is being held at the Davidson County Jail and is in medical isolation.


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Stormtrooper

Police are complicit in politicians' disregard for the rule of law

Ryan McMaken
Mises Institute
Wed, 06 May 2020 00:00 UTC
militarized police
People of a certain age might remember the old John Birch Society slogan "Support your local police!" The idea here is that your local policeman is a liberty-loving buddy of yours who would only ever support just laws and constitutional mandates. Only those bad guys in the FBI or BATF would ever consider violating your rights.

Now, obviously that has always been a rather naïve fantasy, but the notion certainly has a long history of support among American conservatives. The idea that unionized, well-paid government employees sympathize with the common man instead of with the government that signs the cops' checks apparently has long made sense (for some reason) to conservatives and many others.

But thanks to the ongoing "state of emergency" and the fact that state governors, mayors, and health officials now rule by decree, we're witnessing more and more how local law enforcement officers have no particular interest in the rule of law, the Bill of Rights, or basic human rights of any sort. Police have been at the forefront of arresting business owners for the "crime" of using their own private property, using city parks, and engaging in other peaceful activities.

Comment: To be fair, there ARE a number of police who have become more vocal and resistant to the crazed lockdown measures we've been seeing. But how many of those - with conscience. dignity and some power - will be willing to stand up to the mindless and brute power of the authoritarian police state as conditions continue to deteriorate in the US?

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Yellow Vest

Tesla suing Alameda County and will move operations to Texas due to lockdown

Zachary Halaschak
Washington Examiner
Sat, 09 May 2020 14:55 UTC
Elon musk
© Youtube
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he was "immediately" filing a lawsuit against a California county that is not allowing his company's headquarters to reopen because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Making the comments Saturday on Twitter, Musk tore into Alameda County's interim public health officer, Dr. Erica Pan, and also said Tesla will move its operations in California to another state, calling the county's coronavirus restrictions the "final straw."

"Tesla is filing a lawsuit against Alameda County immediately. The unelected & ignorant 'Interim Health Officer' of Alameda is acting contrary to the Governor, the President, our Constitutional freedoms & just plain common sense!" Musk said.

Comment: More on Elon Musk and his response to coronavirus:


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Eye 2

Israel 'forcibly closing' bank accounts of Palestinian prisoners' relatives amid economic crisis and lockdown


HedgeAccordingly
Sat, 09 May 2020 05:19 UTC
israel palestine coronavirus
Palestinian officials said Friday that Israelis forcing banks in the occupied West Bank to close accounts held by the families of prisoners in Israeli jails to prevent the Palestinian Authority from providing stipends to them.

Israel has long objected to the Palestinian Authority's payments to the families of prisoners and those killed in the conflict, including militants, saying it rewards terrorism. The Palestinians view the payments as a social safety net for those living under decades of military occupation.

The apparent move to target banks comes as the Palestinians face a potentially severe economic crisis after weeks of lockdown to combat the coronavirus pandemic. It also comes as Israel vows to annex large parts of the West Bank in line with President Donald Trump's Middle East plan.

Protesters shattered the windows of several bank branches and set fires outside some of them late Thursday and early Friday as word of the new regulations spread.

Comment: The callousness of Israel towards the Palestinians knows no bounds.

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Handcuffs

California physician denounces 'tyrannical' lockdowns in impassioned speech


Conservative Fighters
Sat, 09 May 2020 00:01 UTC
Dr. Jeffrey Barke
A California physician is being hailed as a patriot after delivering an impassioned speech citing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in a sweeping condemnation of the coronavirus lockdowns imposed across America.

Dr. Jeffrey Barke stepped up to the microphone during a protest rally in Riverside County, addressing the crowd that had gathered to demonstrate against the economic shutdowns in his community and beyond.

Barke, a family physician and associate clinical professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, began by asking, "What if wearing a mask in public is not effective?"
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Brick Wall

Is the chilling truth that the decision to impose lockdown was based on crude mathematical guesswork?

Matt Ridley and David Davis
The Telegraph
Sun, 10 May 2020 07:00 UTC
Neil Ferguson
© Thomas Angus/Imperial College LondonPerhaps Professor Ferguson should have stepped back from Sage for reasons other than his lockdown-breaking tryst.
Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College "stepped back" from the Sage group advising ministers when his lockdown-busting romantic trysts were exposed. Perhaps he should have been dropped for a more consequential misstep. Details of the model his team built to predict the epidemic are emerging and they are not pretty. In the respective words of four experienced modellers, the code is "deeply riddled" with bugs, "a fairly arbitrary Heath Robinson machine", has "huge blocks of code - bad practice" and is "quite possibly the worst production code I have ever seen".

When ministers make statements about coronavirus policy they invariably say that they are "following the science". But cutting-edge science is messy and unclear, a contest of ideas arbitrated by facts, a process of conjecture and refutation. This is not new. Almost two centuries ago Thomas Huxley described the "great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."

In this case, that phrase "the science" effectively means the Imperial College model, forecasting potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths, on the output of which the Government instituted the lockdown in March. Sage's advice has a huge impact on the lives of millions. Yet the committee meets in private, publishes no minutes, and until it was put under pressure did not even release the names of its members. We were making decisions based on the output of a black box, and a locked one at that.

Comment: The answer is yes. Or, at the very least, the crude mathematical guesswork is what was used to justify the lockdown to the populace. Orders for it probably came from much higher up by individuals with little care about deaths or mathematical models.

See also:

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Colosseum

In Italy, opponent of lockdown thrown into psychiatric hospital


Voltaire Network
Sat, 09 May 2020 09:27 UTC
Italie, Italia
In the Sicilian city of Ravanusa, 33-year-old Dario Musso drove down the street with a megaphone, wanting to wake up his fellow citizens to the cry of "The pandemic is not deadly! Come out, take off your masks! Open up the stores!"

All witnesses claim that he was perfectly sane, simply outraged.

He was arrested by the Carabinieri (one of Italy's main law enforcement agencies) and sent to a psychiatric hospital, where he was bound to a bed for 4 days, drip fed and sedated.

The hospital refuses to give out any information.
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Megaphone

Former President of the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus: "The people should say NO to all of it"

Claudio Grass
claudiograss.ch
Mon, 04 May 2020 06:38 UTC
Václav Klaus
As we get deeper into this crisis and we get used to our "new normal", it's easy to focus on the daily corona-horror stories in the media or the latest shocking unemployment numbers, and lose track of the bigger picture and of what is really, fundamentally important. Even as the lockdown measures begin to get phased out, the scale of the economic damage is unimaginable and the idea of returning to "business as usual" is no longer tenable. The last couple of months have had a severe impact not just on the economy, but on our societies and geopolitical reality too. These changes are most likely irreversible and we as citizens and as investors will have to be prepared to deal with this massive shift and all that it entails for a long time.

Amid the panic, the distractions and the hyperbole that are prevalent these days, my own daily task has been an effort to separate the signals from the noise. In order to do so, I've also reached out to the few people whose views and insights I have long found invaluable and who have prioritized critical thought and kept their principles intact throughout this crisis. Straight talk and direct answers are very hard to come by these days from most Western leaders and institutional figures, this is why I turned to Former President of the Czech Republic, Prof. Ing. Václav Klaus, who has long been a voice of reason and whose unique perspective is even more important now. In the interview that follows, he shares his views on the current crisis and on what's to come, in a succinct and resolute way and with a directness that is as rare and as it is essential in times like these.
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Attention

Best of the Web: Former Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption: Locking up the population until coronavirus is defeated is a cruel mockery of basic human values

Jonathan Sumption
Daily Mail
Sun, 03 May 2020 13:46 UTC
Leeds
Deserted Leeds city centre
COVID-19 is not the greatest crisis in our history. It is not even the greatest public health crisis in our history. But the lockdown is without doubt the greatest interference with personal liberty in our history.

It is normal at this point to add 'in peacetime'. But we can forget that. Even in wartime, we never confined the entire population to their homes, 24/7, if they did not have some excuse acceptable to a Minister.

States have always tried to confine people known to be carrying dangerous infections. But we live in a new world in which, if we are ill, the State will try to cure us. From this, it is said to follow that the State can take control of our lives against our will even if we are healthy, lest we fall ill and need its services too much.

Suddenly, it is our duty to save the NHS, not the other way round.

It is now pointless to object to the imposition of the lockdown in the first place. It has happened. The question is how we get out of it.

It is a pity that the Government did not ask itself that question when, in the blind panic following the delivery of Imperial College London's Professor Neil Ferguson's statistical projections, it legislated the lockdown on the hoof in a late-night press conference.

They now find themselves trapped by their own decisions.

Comment: See also: Ethics and Fundamental Values in Times of Corona

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Cardboard Box

UN rapporteur on torture 'scared to find out more about our democracies' after delving into Assange case


RT
Sun, 10 May 2020 02:33 UTC
Free Assange
Discovering that the cruelty visited on Julian Assange by Western democracies had been premeditated has heightened the fear of learning more about how those democracies operate, the UN's rapporteur on torture has admitted.

For years Nils Melzer has been researching on behalf of the UN just how vile and degrading the mistreatment of prisoners can become. But learning that states that are supposed to be champions of human rights can be as brutal as any other with people who cross them was quite a shock. The case that made Melzer reassess his beliefs is that of Julian Assange, who, he says, had signs of "prolonged psychological torture" while in the UK.

"First I was shocked that mature democracies could produce such an accident. Then I found out it was no accident. Now, I am scared to find out about our democracies..." the UN official tweeted on Sunday, marking a year since his visit to check on Assange at the UK's Belmarsh top security prison.

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