RTSat, 30 May 2020 16:44 UTC
© Reuters / Adam Bettcher
The St. Paul Police Department has categorically denied one of its officers escalated the Minneapolis riots by smashing the window of an auto parts store while undercover, after social media sleuths claimed to have identified him.
St. Paul Police Department attempted to squelch viral rumors fingering Officer Jacob Pederson as the agent provocateur who smashed the windows of a Minneapolis AutoZone earlier this week in footage widely circulated on social media. In a series of tweets posted on Thursday, they denied that the man in the footage was Pederson and attempted to shame people for spreading the rumor, insisting their officer had been "working hard, keeping people and property safe, and protecting the right to peacefully assemble."
© Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP
A protester smashes a window at the CNN center Friday, May 29, 2020, in Atlanta. They carried signs and chanted their messages of outrage over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
An angry mob outraged at the death of George Floyd stormed CNN's world headquarters Friday night in Atlanta, vandalizing the building's facade, breaking windows, and tossing a firecracker or smoke bomb at officers blocking the entrance.
Video posted by CNN personalities and others showed demonstrators in a large, rowdy crowd jumping on police cars outside the CNN Center, which was defaced with graffiti, setting fires, and throwing rocks and bottles.
Police reacted by deploying tear gas and making some arrests, as shown on video.
Comment: Things certainly are heating up! With the suppression everyone has been under with the lockdown, all that was needed was a spark of sufficient magnitude to make the people explode. Apparently, the murder of George Floyd was just that spark.
See also:
Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon
Florida TodayTue, 19 May 2020 15:56 UTC
© Courtesy of Rebekah Jones
Rebekah Jones is the architect of Florida's COVID-19 dashboard
The scientist who created Florida's COVID-19 data portal wasn't just removed from her position on May 5, she was fired on Monday by the Department of Health, she said, for refusing to manipulate data.
Rebekah Jones said in an email to FLORIDA TODAY that she single-handedly created two applications in two languages, four dashboards, six unique maps with layers of data functionality for 32 variables covering a half a million lines of data. Her objective was to create a way for Floridians and researchers to see what the COVID-19 situation was in real time.
Then, she was dismissed.
"I worked on it alone, sixteen hours a day for two months, most of which I was never paid for, and now that this has happened I'll probably never get paid for," she wrote in an email, confirming that she had not just been reassigned on May 5, but fired from her job as Geographic Information Systems manager for the Florida Department of Health.
Comment: The lockdown was pointless and damaging to the whole country. But allegedly manipulating data to reinforce that conclusion is bad science. The information should stand on its own.
Graham Dockery
RTFri, 29 May 2020 15:17 UTC
© Reuters / Carlos Barria
George Floyd's apparent murder by a Minneapolis police officer wasn't just a shocking display of police brutality. It was part of Russia's plan to topple the US, according to the twilight-zone takes of the liberal intelligentsia.
Floyd, an unarmed black man, died in police custody after he was crushed under the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on Monday. Since his death, the city has been consumed by riots, looting and arson. The incident was just one in the US' history of police beatings and killings of unarmed black males, from Rodney King in 1991 to Eric Garner in 2014.
However, a cohort of Russia-obsessed pundits and influencers have already decided that Vladimir Putin, not Derek Chauvin, is the real villain in the story.
Megan Fox
PJ MediaThu, 21 May 2020 15:07 UTC
Three Cherokee County Department of Social Services social workers, including the DSS director, were indicted with more than three dozen felony and misdemeanor charges in North Carolina on Monday. Among the arrested are Cindy Palmer, DSS director and wife of County Sheriff Derrick Palmer, David Hughes, a supervisor at DSS, and Scott Lindsay, former DSS attorney. The three were booked and released on bond.
The charges included multiple felonies and misdemeanors related to a yearslong Cherokee County DSS practice that removed children from parents without judicial input. The Carolina Public Press has the story.
RTSat, 30 May 2020 13:47 UTC
© REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
Despite a curfew imposed by the city government, widespread protests carry on in Minneapolis, as vandalism and arson break out for the third consecutive night following the police killing of George Floyd.
After unleashing flash bangs and tear gas on protesters who continued to amass in the area around the Minneapolis Police Department's 3rd precinct headquarters on Friday night, security forces have apparently fallen back, failing to disperse the crowd. Demonstrators have since been allowed to wreak destruction and freely roam the city in defiance of Mayor Jacob Frey's curfew order, which took effect at 8pm local time.
Comment: Protesters in Atlanta have
vandalized the CNN offices. It's rather ironic that the media organization which has riled up racial tensions and divisions between people in the US is getting vandalized by those very same people.
The National Guard was then
called in by the Georgia governor in response to the looting and mayhem in Atlanta.
In San Jose, California, protesters
shut down a freeway.
The White House was briefly
placed on lockdown by the Secret Service as protesters arrived outside.
In Brooklyn, over 150 protesters were
arrested after a police precinct was busted into by them and a police cruiser was torched.
Back in Minneapolis, crowds
surrounded another police precinct as the National Guard and police pulled back and had no choice but to give up policing the foolish 8pm curfew.
Crowds also began looting outside the 5th precinct in Minneapolis:
The Pentagon
plans to send military police to Minneapolis to try and control the unrest. It's never good when the military is being activated against its own citizens.
Violent protests in Oakland, California led to a police officer being
shot and killed, which is only going to further tensions and make the police more likely to crack down harder on protests. In Portland, Oregon, looters
ransacked a Louis Vitton store, set fire to police HQ, and trashed several banks.
Looters also
plundered a jewelry store in Los Angeles.
In Minneapolis, even the Amish
got in on the protests, albeit in a peaceful fashion.
© Twitter / @NedWhat
© iStock/DallasO75219
Protesters clashed with police officers in riot gear Friday night and early Saturday morning in downtown Dallas.
Protesters gathered in front of the Dallas Police Department headquarters on the 1400 block of Lamar St. Friday afternoon for what was initially a peaceful demonstration, but the subsequent march became tumultuous as participants clashed with police officers in riot gear all throughout downtown Dallas.
The protest, organized and advertised by the activist group Next Generation Action Network, began Friday evening in front of police headquarters, where local and regional civil rights activists and community organizers spoke to hundreds of people. Speakers levied criticism at both President Donald Trump and his opponent, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, for their stances on civil rights.
Because the march was organized in solidarity with George Floyd, a black man from Minnesota who died on May 25 as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck, most of the rally focused on police brutality.
Comment: It's little wonder that the violence currently happening in Minneapolis would spread to other cities. Thankfully, Dallas seems to have been mostly spared, for now, with only a few bad apples attempting to spoil an otherwise peaceful protest.
See also:
Is lockdown a gargantuan mistake? That's the view of a growing number of thinkers and critics, including The Spectator
's very own Toby Young, who sees the political class's shutting down of entire populations as the most catastrophic policy error in history. Not every free thinker agrees, however. We asked Matt Labash, a contributing editor and a skeptic of lockdown skepticism, to challenge Toby over email.
Matt Labash: Toby, thanks for stepping into the squared circle and joining me for a Pandemania tussle as a gentleman pugilist, sage, and co-equal partner in the search for truth. And also, as a fellow amateur epidemiologist, which there is no longer any shame in saying, since the pros have bunged things up so spectacularly. (Remember when they insisted we shouldn't wear masks, before insisting we do? Makes me want to cough on them.) But I look forward to going old-school in the sort of online dialogue Slate used to do, back when it was still legal to speak to people you disagree with. It beats the hell out of the communication rage of the moment, the inspirational Zoom choir. I solemnly vow that no matter how hairy this gets, I will at no point break into 'We're All In This Together' from
High School Musical, featuring special guest-star Ashley Tisdale.
Comment: For all his talk of being libertarian leaning, LeBash comes across as more of a hysterical worry-wart, all too eager to trade his civil liberties for any modicum of supposed safety. It goes to show that the real virus circulating the globe at the moment is fear, along with it's co-symptom lack of clear-thinking. And sadly, it seems LaBash has a full-blown infection.
See also:
Back in April
The New York Times Magazine ran a report on a brave 26-year-old Emergency Room doctor in New York City who contracted the coronavirus and later died.
Well, it was
all hogwash.
The New York Times admitted this week the doctor
didn't die and didn't have coronavirus.
Comment: It could have been a case of mistaken identity, likely due to a lack of vigilance on the part of the
New York Times staff eager for click-bait headlines and sensationalist content. Or it could have been purposely deceptive for the same reasons. Either way, the goal of getting readers outraged and consuming more of their coverage was achieved by the
New York Times. In the breakneck speed of the 24-hour new cycle, how many will go back to the story to find the retraction?
See also:
In the past week,
Dr. Anthony Fauci and the
New England Journal of Medicine have admitted that masks are little more than symbols. Virtue signaling.
For those of you who shout "science" like it's a Tourette tick, this is from
the New England Journal of Medicine on May 21, 2020:
We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.
So, why are we ordered to wear masks? Symbolism. From the same article in
NEJM:
Comment: Things certainly are heating up! With the suppression everyone has been under with the lockdown, all that was needed was a spark of sufficient magnitude to make the people explode. Apparently, the murder of George Floyd was just that spark.
See also: