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Big Brother is Watching! Facial recognition camera system named 'Orwell' to be installed in all 43,000 schools in Russia for 'safety purposes'

surveillance
© Sputnik / Maxim Bogodvid 18
All Russian schools will soon be equipped with face-recognition cameras, with the stated aim of protecting the safety of children by tracking a child's comings and goings in school, as well as by identifying visitors.

According to reports by Russian business daily Vedomosti, Rostec's National Center for Informatization (NCI) will be equipping educational centers with video surveillance systems for inside their buildings, as well as cameras to protect their perimeters.

The video-recording equipment will be hooked up to a platform called 'Orwell,' a surveillance system with the ability to perform face recognition, provided by Russian company NtechLab.

Comment: As Benjamin Franklin famously said, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."


Heart - Black

Elderly man's survival of COVID-19 comes with a $1.1 million, 181-page bill

Michael Flor
© Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times
Health care workers applaud Michael Flor upon his release from Swedish Issaquah last month Pushing the wheelchair is Dr. Anne Lipke, Flor’s critical care doctor.
Remember Michael Flor, the longest-hospitalized COVID-19 patient who, when he unexpectedly did not die, was jokingly dubbed "the miracle child?"

Now they can also call him the million-dollar baby.

Flor, 70, who came so close to death in the spring that a night-shift nurse held a phone to his ear while his wife and kids said their final goodbyes, is recovering nicely these days at his home in West Seattle. But he says his heart almost failed a second time when he got the bill from his health care odyssey the other day.

Comment: Also see: Undercover Nurse Exposes Neglect, Mismanagement & Corruption in Treatment of Covid-19 Patients in New York City


Jet3

Russian jets intercept US strategic bombers over Baltic Sea

US B-52H strategic bombers
© Ruptly
US B-52H strategic bombers have again been spotted near Russian borders, forcing its Baltic Sea Fleet's Su-27 fighter jets to take to the skies and monitor their actions, the Russian Defense Ministry has said.

Video released by Moscow showed all stages of the 'intercept' - from the pilot in full gear rushing towards his jet to the Su-27s gaining on the American nuclear-capable bombers and "foreign surveillance planes" above the neutral waters.

NATO aircraft have frequently been spotted close to Russian airspace above Baltic and Black Sea frontiers in recent years. The flights, which Moscow deems provocative, have intensified since 2014, when Russia reabsorbed Crimea and a military conflict broke out in eastern Ukraine.

Arrow Down

Seven Minneapolis police officers quit after George Floyd protests due to 'lack of support from city leaders'

george floyd protest
© Reuters / Eric Miller
At least seven police officers in Minneapolis have quit and others are in the process of resigning in the wake of the protests over George Floyd's death that have morphed into a rallying cry to defund or dismantle law enforcement.

Current and former officials with the Minneapolis Police Department told the Minneapolis Star Tribune on Sunday that more than half a dozen police officers are in the process of resigning, citing a lack of support from department and city leaders. However, police stressed to Fox News that only seven have been "separated" from the department since Floyd's death on May 25.

"We don't know how many plan on leaving until they leave. Seven have had their employment agreement separated. That's the bottom line," a police spokesperson told Fox News on Sunday evening.

Comment: For important information on the call to 'defund the police', check out:


Blackbox

NYPD says 'no criminality' after officers fall ill after drinking milkshakes at Shake Shack in Manhattan

Shake Shack
© LA Times
Shake Shack tweeted that it was "horrified" by reports of an alleged contamination in New York. The restaurant chain said it was working with police in the investigation.
The New York Police Department said "no criminality" had occurred after investigating whether three of its officers were poisoned after drinking milkshakes on Monday night at a Shake Shack restaurant in Manhattan.

The officers complained of "not feeling well" before being hospitalized and later released, the NYPD said in a statement to USA TODAY, and Shake Shack said via Twitter that it was "horrified" and working with police.

Chief Rodney Harrison, NYPD's chief of detectives, tweeted early Tuesday: "After a thorough investigation by the NYPD's Manhattan South investigators, it has been determined that there was no criminality by shake shack's employees."

Comment: It would be nice to know how the NYPD came to the conclusion that the poisoning was unintentional. It's better to think of the incident as an accident, and it may well be, but tensions are such at the moment that nothing seems out of the realm of possibility. Perhaps the cops thought it better to quash rather than pursue it.

See also:


Chalkboard

The modelers thought of everything except reality

artificial intelligence
The archives of AIER dating back to 1933 show that we had no comments on the polio epidemic (1948-1951), the Asian Flu (1957-59), the Hong Kong flu (1968-69), the Avian bird flu (2006), or the Swine flu pandemic of 2009, which was a strain most like 1918 and therefore, one might suppose, would have caused panic but did not.

We had nothing to say because disease mitigation is a job for medical professionals, not economists and certainly not politicians.

The problem is that this time, the disease mitigators (some of them, the ones in power and with the ear of politicians) didn't stay out of economics. Indeed, their plans for mitigation trampled all over commerce, life, and the freedoms that are necessary to make it function. For a few months in 2020, the presumptuous model-building disease mitigators became central planners, overriding the wisdom of not only medical professionals but also economists, philosophers, political scientists, historians, and everyone else including legislatures and voters.

Our first piece on the topic ran January 27. The focus was on the quarantine power and the argument was simple: because people are not ridiculous and know how to deal with disease in consultation with medical professionals, this state power should not be deployed. At the time, people said we were being alarmist even for saying this. Nothing like this could ever happen in the U.S. because we have a Constitution and courts and a tradition of trusting the people.

Comment: See also:


Arrow Down

'The left is taking us backward': Dave Rubin talks to Brendan O'Neill about the 'mind virus' of wokeness

dave rubin
Wokeness has taken over the West. Even the largest crisis since the Second World War has not been enough to disturb the woke consensus in elite circles. The left, which once bravely fought for freedom, is now the driving force of an intolerant and regressive politics. This is the subject of Dave Rubin's Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in the Age of Unreason. Rubin joined spiked editor Brendan O'Neill for the latest episode of The Brendan O'Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract. Listen to the full conversation here.

Brendan O'Neill: Much of the world is under lockdown. Some of us cannot even leave our homes without good reason. Humankind faces a pretty serious crisis. But all these regressive trends that we have been talking about are still there and burst through every now and then. Do you think that it is not that the virus itself will do away with this stuff, but that there is an opportunity for those of us who believe in a more liberal-minded politics to push further for our ideals?

Comment: See also:


Brick Wall

Class, not race, divides America

class warfare
Nothing is stranger in these tense days than the monotony of the inexact and non-descriptive mantra of "white privilege" and "white solidarity" — as if there is some monolithic white bloc, or as if class matters not at all.

In truth, the clingers, the deplorables, the irredeemables, and Joe Biden's "dregs" have very little in common with those who so libel them, but superficially share supposedly omnipotent and similar skin color.

In the past, we saw such tensions among so-called whites in CNN's reporting of the allegedly toothless rubes at Trump rallies, in the Strzok-Page text trove about Walmart's smelly patrons, in the callous coastal disregard for the five-decade wasting away of the American industrial heartland, in the permissible elite collective disparagement of Christian evangelicals, and in the anthropological curiosity about and condescension toward such exotic, but presumably backward, Duck Dynasty and NASCAR peoples.

As a result, we have reached the surreal point at which the nation's privileged whites on campuses such as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, in the top echelon of politics, and the corporate and entertainment worlds, all deplore in the abstract something they call "white privilege" in others who have never really experienced it.

Info

European Court upholds right to boycott Israel

boycott israel
© Konrad K. / SIPA
Calls to boycott Israel are protected free speech, says European Court of Human Rights.
The European Court of Human Rights struck a major blow to Israel's efforts to silence its critics on Thursday when it overturned the criminal convictions against 11 Palestinian rights activists in France.

The court ruled unanimously that the convictions against the activists for calling on shoppers to boycott Israeli goods violated the European Convention on Human Rights' guarantee of freedom of expression.

The court has ordered the French government to pay each of the activists about $8,000 in damages and awarded them their legal costs.

Comment: See also:


Che Guevara

Woke wave: Julius Caesar statue in Belgium vandalized with 'crook' graffiti

Caesar statue graffitti
The vandalism of several statues in Flanders has left locals questioning the motivations of the damage, after a statue of Julius Caesar - not Leopold II - was defaced over the weekend.

The statue of Caesar in Velzeke, in Zottegem (East Flanders), was damaged during the night of Saturday to Sunday, with the word 'krapuul' (crook) scrawled on the base of the statue. The spear that Caesar held in one hand was also torn off.

An investigation has been opened into the vandals. "We will estimate more precisely on Monday the extent of the damage and the repairs to be carried out. These will be at the expense of the perpetrators," said Mayor Jenne De Potter (CD&V).

A kilometre further on, marble statues in the garden of the cloister of Saint-Antoine were also damaged, potentially by the same individuals.

Comment: In their "all or nothing," "ends justify the means" ideologically-possessed insanity, many in the West are seeking to deface and destroy the symbols and the very history that statues represent - as if these acts of vandalism will have any bearing on the present. The social justice contagion cannot re-write the acts of past leaders try as it may.

And a note to the goons who defaced the statue of Julius Caesar: for goodness sake, open a book or three and learn something about the man. He was, in fact, one of the good guys!