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Pandemic Lockdown Battles Offer Glimpses of Political Conflicts to Come

Across the country, government officials are tightening and reimposing curfews, stay-at-home orders, mask mandates, and other restrictions as COVID-19 numbers climb. But with public patience over lockdowns wearing thin, many individuals and local authorities openly reject rules that drive people to poverty and despair. County sheriffs in California, New York, North Dakota, Oregon and elsewhere say they’ll have nothing to do with enforcement efforts and spar with governors who resent such independence.

It’s the rebellious spirit of the earlier sanctuary city and Second Amendment sanctuary movements, amplified by the pressures of the pandemic into an eruption of what some legal scholars call “punitive federalism.” Get used to it, because our politically polarized era offers fresh soil for such dictates and defiance.

California’s revolt is especially widespread. “All told, over a third of Californians live in a county with a sheriff promising not to enforce the governor’s stay-at-home order,” Reason‘s Christian Britschgi pointed out this week. Ironically, when Gov. Gavin Newsom threatened to withhold funds from jurisdictions that ignore his dictates, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco snapped back that the governor was behaving just like President Trump, who California’s elected officials have criticized for using money in an effort to extract compliance.

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Andrew Yang Calls For Bar Codes to Identify People Who Have Been Vaccinated

Yang suggested that people could also be given bracelets before they’re allowed to “interact more freely,” while also suggesting those who don’t take the vaccine be denied entry to sports games and other events.

“Tough to have mass gatherings like concerts or ballgames without either mass adoption of the vaccine or a means of signaling,” said Yang.

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American Teenagers Jailed For 4 Months For Violating COVID-19 Quarantine Rules In Cayman Islands

Skylar Mack, 18, of Georgia, broke her two-week quarantine after two days because she wanted to watch her boyfriend, Vanjae Ramgeet — a 24-year-old jet ski racer from the Cayman Islands — compete in a local race on Nov. 29, People reported.

Under Cayman’s coronavirus guidelines, travelers are required to undergo a 14-day quarantine-in-residence upon arriving on the island.

Mack pled guilty to removing her geo-fencing bracelet and breaking quarantine for seven hours in order to watch her boyfriend compete in a local jet-ski race. He pled guilty to aiding and abetting her.

The couple was initially sentenced to a fine and community service by Magistrate Angelyn Hernandez.

However, Patrick Moran, the Director of Public Prosecutions for the Cayman Islands, appealed the sentence. He claimed it was too lenient and therefore, unlikely to deter others from breaching COVID guidelines.

Moran then sought prison terms for Mack and Ramgeet for the nonviolent transgression. Neither were infected with COVID-19 when Mack breached quarantine.

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Scientists think they’ve detected radio emissions from an alien world

Scientists may have detected radio emissions from a planet orbiting a star beyond our sun for the first time.

The astronomers behind the new research used a radio telescope in the Netherlands to study three different stars known to host exoplanets. The researchers compared what they saw to observations of Jupiter, diluted as if being seen from a star system dozens of light-years away. And one star system stood out: Tau Boötes, which contains at least one exoplanet. If the detection holds up, it could open the door to better understanding the magnetic fields of exoplanets and therefore the exoplanets themselves, the researchers hope.

“We present one of the first hints of detecting an exoplanet in the radio realm,” Jake Turner, an astronomer at Cornell University and lead author of the new research, said in a statement. “We make the case for an emission by the planet itself. From the strength and polarization of the radio signal and the planet’s magnetic field, it is compatible with theoretical predictions.”

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White House makes Friday afternoon announcement of what members of the Space Force will be called: reports

Vice President Mike Pence on Friday announced that members of the Space Force will be officially called “guardians.”

“Vice President Mike Pence announces that uniformed members of the U.S. Space Force will be called Guardians. [There] you have it: Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Guardians,” Defense One editor Marcus Weisgerber reported.

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The poison found in everyone, even unborn babies – and who is responsible for it

Imagine that a small group of people coordinated the intentional manufacture and release of a lethal poison – and imagine they knew this poison had special properties that meant, once released into the world, it would be inevitable that it would make its way into the blood of virtually every person on the planet, even babies in their mother’s womb, and stay there, like a ticking time bomb.

Well, that “ticking time bomb” waiting to explode into serious, even fatal, disease is not a fictional device from some doomsday thriller; it is real, it is inside virtually all of us, right now. Tick, tick, tick.

And we know exactly who is responsible. For a long time, powerful corporate interests succeeded in keeping this heinous, brazen, and ongoing public health threat hidden from regulators, from scientists, and from the public. But it is now a matter of public record that these people knew the potential for harm and grave threat to human life, and continued anyway.

The only reason the world knows anything about this today is because, in 1998, Earl Tennant, a courageous farmer from West Virginia, came to me demanding answers. His cattle were dying in droves and he was certain the trouble stemmed from the white foaming crud defiling his creek where his cattle drank. Something was efficiently killing off not only his cattle but also the deer and other wildlife. Earl wanted answers and I wanted to help him. Neither of us could have fathomed just how bad or how deep this really went.

Getting the answers required over two decades of litigation, continuing to this day. But like the cattle and other animals on his farm, Earl would not survive long enough to get all his answers. The dark secrets deliberately withheld from Earl about his creek and his dying cows, went far beyond his property line. The poison flowing into Earl’s creek was also leaching into the drinking water of 70,000 of his neighbors, but no one was being told a thing. And this was just the tip of the iceberg. In secret, the poison had in fact streamed all across the country, and into the bloodstreams of virtually every American.

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Lawmakers to Debate Elimination of Religious Exemption to Vaccines

Before COVID hit in March, the hottest topic at the state capitol was whether to eliminate the religious exemption to childhood vaccines. With the COVID vaccine on everyone’s mind, does that complicate the debate? 

“It’s probably not complicated by the facts but probably more complicated by the emotion of it,” incoming House Speaker Matt Ritter said.  

Ritter has promised a vote on the issue next year.

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