Tag: coronavirus

Australia Goes Full Fascist: State Issues First Ankle Tracker for Quarantine Violator

This week, Australia took its burgeoning fascist police state to a new level, with officials in Western Australia now issuing electronic ankle bracelets and forced isolation in specially designated hotels to anyone it believes has violated the new raft of controversial new ‘COVID laws.’

A 33-year-old woman from Perth in Western Australia has become the first person to be fitted with the state’s new electronic monitoring bracelet, after allegedly violating new COVID quarantine rules imposed on the population.

According to police reports, the woman arrived home from New South Wales state on September 1st, and was then directed to ‘self-isolate’ in her Perth home for 14 days as part of Australia’s new mandatory quarantine system.

She was then caught by agents working with the state’s newly deputised COVID enforcement force known as the “Self-Quarantine Assurance Team.” Agents claim they were only conducting a “routine check” when they discovered two men visiting the woman at her own house. Agents then raised the alarm to central office who then promptly ordered the woman be removed from her home and placed in a specially designated hotel which is being used by the state as a makeshift isolation facility where she would be tagged and surveilled for a period of two weeks.

On top of the forced detention, the woman was issued with a punitive $1,000 AUD fine for interacting with the two men during her initial home quarantine order.

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From 9/11 to Covid-19: Nineteen Years of Permanent “Emergency”

During March and April of this year—during the early days of the covid-19 panic—each day came to be accompanied by a general feeling of dread. As new emergency orders and decrees rained down from governors, mayors, and faceless health bureaucrats, I wondered, What new awful thing will governments think up today? As business and churches were closed by government edict, politicians increasingly were threatening to arrest and jail ordinary citizens for doing things that were perfectly legal mere days before.

Even worse was the new orthodoxy that seemed to immediately spring up. All dissent from the new regime of lockdowns and business seizures was denounced and mocked. We were now all expected to chant new slogans. “We’re all in this together. Flatten the curve.”

There was no sign of any sizable opposition. The courts were silent. So-called due process was abandoned.

But for those of us who are old enough to remember the dark times that followed the 9/11 attacks, the feelings of dread had a familiarity to them.

The blind sloganeering, the anger toward dissent, and the obeisance toward politicians who were credited with “keeping us safe” brought back bad old memories.

They were memories of the days and months and years that followed the 9/11 attacks. These were the days of so many new assaults on basic human freedoms and human rights. They were days when the public was bullied into accepting whatever new scheme politicians were dreaming up in the name of keeping us “safe.”

In many ways, the current hysteria is even worse than that of the early years of the twenty-first century. It affects the everyday lives of countless Americans in ways the 9/11 panic did not.  But the current crisis is nonetheless very much a continuation of the attitudes and paranoia that surged nineteen years ago.

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Surprise! Politicians Worldwide Aren’t Following Their Own COVID Rules…

Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our weekly roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, risks to your prosperity… and on occasion, inspiring poetic justice.

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Chinese virologist claims she has proof COVID-19 was made in Wuhan lab

A Chinese virologist who has reportedly been in hiding for fear of her safety has stepped out into the public eye again to make the explosive claim that she has the scientific evidence to prove COVID-19 was man-made in a lab in China.

Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a scientist who says she did some of the earliest research into COVID-19 last year, made the comments Friday during an interview on British talk show “Loose Women.”

When asked where the deadly virus that has killed more than 900,000 around the globe comes from, Yan — speaking via video chat from a secret location — replied, “It comes from the lab — the lab in Wuhan and the lab is controlled by China’s government.”

She insisted that widespread reports that the virus originated last year from a wet market in Wuhan, China, are “a smokescreen.”

“The first thing is the [meat] market in Wuhan … is a smokescreen and this virus is not from nature,” Yan claimed, explaining that she got “her intelligence from the CDC in China, from the local doctors.”

The virologist has previously accused Beijing of lying about when it learned of the killer bug and engaging in an extensive cover-up of her work.

She had said that her former supervisors at the Hong Kong School of Public Health, a reference laboratory for the World Health Organization, silenced her when she sounded the alarm about human-to-human transmission in December last year.

In April, Yan reportedly fled Hong Kong and escaped to America to raise awareness about the pandemic.

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No, the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally Didn’t Spawn 250,000 Coronavirus Cases

Here’s what we were told: An August motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, helped spread COVID-19 to more than a quarter-million Americans, making it the root of about 20 percent of all new coronavirus cases in the U.S. last month. So said a new white paper from the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, at least. And national news outlets ran with it.

“Sturgis Motorcycle Rally was ‘superspreading event’ that cost public health $12.2 billion,” tweeted The Hill.

“The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally held in South Dakota last month may have caused 250,000 new coronavirus cases,” said NBC News.

“The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally represents a situation where many of the ‘worst-case scenarios’ for superspreading occurred simultaneously,” the researchers write in the new paper, titled “The Contagion Externality of a Superspreading Event: The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and COVID-19.”

Not so fast. Let’s take a look at what they actually tracked and what’s mere speculation.

According to South Dakota health officials, 124 new cases in the state—including one fatal case—were directly linked to the rally. Overall, COVID-19 cases linked to the Sturgis rally were reported in 11 states as of September 2, to a tune of at least 260 new cases, according to The Washington Post.

There very well may be more cases that have been linked to the early August event, but so far, that’s only 260 confirmed cases—about 0.1 percent of the number the IZA paper offers.

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