The crews of two Royal Canadian Navy vessels were ordered to sequester in a Halifax hotel for two weeks as the federal government announced Monday that it is ready to mobilize up to 24,000 Canadian troops at the drop of a hat to help with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rear-Admiral Craig Baines, commander of Maritime Atlantic Forces, ordered sailors from HMCS Ville de Quebec and HMCS Moncton as well as the crew of a maritime helicopter detachment to sequester to ensure they are clear of the respiratory illness.

Efforts are underway to find an appropriate hotel, Baines said in a letter to sailors and their families, adding the sequestration won't begin until April. After two weeks, the vessels and helicopter will head out to sea where they will be ready to respond to a domestic emergency as needed.

"Where no case is made out against a man, or such a flimsy one that it cannot stand on its feet, he is entitled to say: 'I ask the jury to say that I am not guilty without hearing a word from me.'"

That sentence was written almost sixty years ago by one of the most brilliant tellers of courtroom stories in the English language, Henry Cecil. Nom de plume of an English county court judge, Cecil put the words in the mouth of the barrister for the defendant, in his summing-up for the jury. The story is a whodunit, with much of Cecil's characteristic poking of fun and then, at the end — well, a surprise I shan't reveal.

In the tale of the trial of four defendants accused of murder in the shooting-down of Malaysia Airlines MH17, there are no jokes. But the proceedings which commenced at Schiphol, in The Netherlands, on March 9 and adjourned on March 23 for ten weeks, did have a surprise ending. That is also the point of Cecil's defence speech. The point is that the Dutch prosecutors have revealed the case they are making out against the defendants, and also, they insist, against the Russian state, is such a flimsy one, it cannot stand on its own feet. It should therefore be dismissed by the panel of three judges.

Recognizing this in his first ruling, issued on March 23, Hendrik Steenhuis, the presiding judge, gave the prosecution, the Dutch Government behind them, and the US Government behind them, one last chance.

This was his order to produce in court the crucial piece of evidence on which the case of murder depends - the US satellite images which US officials have long claimed to prove the firing of a BUK missile at MH17 and to have reported in secret to Dutch intelligence. But since the evidence of the chief of Dutch military intelligence, and also of the investigating police and prosecutors - official secrets now leaked in public - is that the US has not provided the evidence, the judge's order is an ultimatum.

President Trump on Monday lashed out at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for criticizing his response to the coronavirus pandemic, calling her a "sick puppy."

"It's a sad thing," Trump said during a call-in interview on "Fox & Friends" Monday morning after he was asked to respond to Pelosi's criticism a day prior. "She's a sick puppy in my opinion. She's got a lot of problems."

Pelosi on Sunday accused Trump of downplaying the public health crisis in a way that cost American lives, saying that "his denial at the beginning was deadly" on CNN's "State of the Union."

"When he made the other day when he was signing the bill, he said just think 20 days ago everything was great. No, everything wasn't great," Pelosi said, referring to the $2 trillion bipartisan relief bill the president signed on Friday.

Emergency Room Footage on CBS Matches Footage from Italian Hospital!

This is footage from SKY News on March 22 from Italy.
And here is footage from CBS News during their New York City report on March 25.
CBS News painted a dire picture from New York City this week in their coronavirus coverage.

On Wednesday morning CBS aired this footage from a New York hospital.


The footage matches SKY News video from inside an Italian hospital from Sunday March 22.


UPDATE: ALX posted the video comparison from the two news outlets.

Crises, like pandemics, don't break things in and of themselves; they show you what's already broken.

- Patrick Wyman

Big macro crises in any form are scary, massively disruptive, and in some cases, literally deadly. This is why governments and entrenched institutions always see such events as opportunities to further consolidate wealth and power.

The current global pandemic is no exception, as I detailed in last week's piece: Power Grab. While it's necessary to be aware of this reality — and to push back against it wherever possible — it's equally important to recognize there's a silver lining to all of this.

The paradigm we live under depends on us not thinking too hard about how power functions. It relies on us being so busy with the basics of survival, or distracted by superficial consumerism and endless entertainment, to contemplate how the system actually works. This method of social control has been wildly successful throughout my lifetime, but what's interesting about moments of global crises is the mask is forced off for a period. In a desperate scramble to marshal all of the corporate-imperial state's resources to save the interests of the oligarchy, we're shown in full color who really matters and who doesn't.

The scientist whose calculations about the potentially devastating impact of the coronavirus directly led to the countrywide lockdown has been criticised in the past for flawed research.

Professor Neil Ferguson, of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College in London, produced a paper predicting that Britain was on course to lose 250,000 people during the coronavirus epidemic unless stringent measures were taken. His research is said to have convinced Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his advisors to introduce the lockdown.

However, it has now emerged that Ferguson has been criticised in the past for making predictions based on allegedly faulty assumptions which nevertheless shaped government strategies and impacted the UK economy.

In this article, I'll present quotes from official sources about their own diagnostic test for the coronavirus. I'm talking about fatal flaws in the test.

Because case numbers are based on those tests (or no tests at all), the whole "pandemic effect" has been created out of fake science.

In a moment of truth, a propaganda pro might murmur to a colleague, "You know, we've got a great diagnostic test for the virus. The test turns out all sorts of results that say this person is diseased and that person is diseased. Millions of diseased people. But the test doesn't really measure that. The test is ridiculous, but ridiculous in our favor. It builds the picture of a global pandemic. An excuse to lock down the planet and wreck economies and lives..."

The widespread test for the COVID-19 virus is called the PCR. I have written much about it in past articles.

Now let's go to published official literature, and see what it reveals. Spoiler alert: the admitted holes and shortcomings of the test are devastating.

From "CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel" [1]:

"Detection of viral RNA may not indicate the presence of infectious virus or that 2019-nCoV is the causative agent for clinical symptoms."

Translation: A positive test doesn't guarantee that the COVID virus is causing infection at all. And, ahem, reading between the lines, maybe the COVID virus might not be in the patient's body at all, either.

A former supreme court justice has heavily criticised Derbyshire police for stopping people exercising in the Peak District saying that such behaviour risks plunging Britain into a "police state".

Lord Sumption warned that police had no legal power to enforce "ministers' wishes" and that the public should not be "resigning their liberty" to over-zealous citizens in uniform.

"The behaviour of the Derbyshire police in trying to shame people in using their undoubted right to take exercise in the country and wrecking beauty spots in the fells so people don't want to go there is frankly disgraceful," he said.

We must reject such authoritarian measures wholly, no matter who says they're 'necessary'!

As a millennial, much of my adulthood has been punctuated by severe national emergencies. The first my generation experienced was the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. We all watched in horror as the months-long media spectacle replayed footage of the towers swallowing airplanes and crumbling into fire and dust. The moment of national solidarity and everyday heroism was brief.

The government quickly responded by attempting to achieve two things: one, expanding executive power, and two, transferring public wealth into private corporations.

The Bush administration achieved the first by passing the Patriot Act, which built the foundation for what is probably the world's most expansive surveillance state, but also by setting legal precedents that violated basic constitutional rights and by creating the Department for Homeland Security, with its aggressive constituent agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The second goal was achieved with the "war on terror", which involved unilateral occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and subsequent military forays into many African countries. In Iraq, private security, logistics and reconstruction contractors swallowed up $138bn alone. Since 2001, $5.9tn in taxpayer dollars have gone toward wars (not to mention resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and a foreign policy blackhole that still haunts the Middle East). Neither of these goals addressed the root cause of the crisis, and arguably exacerbated the conditions that led to 9/11.

Israel pummeled the besieged Gaza Strip on Saturday, its bombs targeting a number of locations in the Palestinian territory, which is struggling to deal with a deadly outbreak of coronavirus.

Warplanes fired missiles which struck areas north-west of Gaza City and east of the town of Jabalya. Artillery shells also hit a spot east of the city, causing damage to infrastructure. No injuries were reported.

The Israeli armed forces claimed that the aerial assault was a response for missiles being fired into the south of the country, the stock response used to justify such an attack. None of the Palestinian resistance factions claimed responsibility for the alleged rocket attack on Israel.

In a further operation, the Israeli navy opened fire on a Palestinian fisherman off the coast of Gaza City. The Palestinian fishing industry has suffered huge losses as fishermen are frequently targeted by Israeli gunboats and are denied access to the sea.