Tag: police state

New Zealand Joins the International Crackdown on COVID Mandate Protests

Last week, with the world understandably distracted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, New Zealand authorities took advantage of the moment to disperse an inconvenient protest against pandemic mandates. Like Canada’s Freedom Convoy, by which it was inspired, the protest was grounded in grassroots disagreement with authoritarian policies, mixed with a little nuttiness, and had outlived its welcome. Also like its inspiration, the protest in New Zealand was forcibly shut down to the surprise of those with preconceptions about peaceful, tolerant democracies. Governments are most peaceful, it turns out, when there’s little dissent to test that tolerance and, under pandemic stresses, gloves are coming off in an increasingly illiberal world.

“Police in riot gear cleared a protest camp outside New Zealand’s Parliament on Wednesday, sparking violent clashes that saw dozens arrested as protesters hurled bricks and set fire to their tents,” Michael E. Miller wrote March 2 for The Washington Post. “In what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said was a planned operation to remove the camp, hundreds of officers assembled at dawn and began towing the cars and trucks demonstrators have used to block streets for more than three weeks, in imitation of the ‘Freedom Convoy’ in Canada.”

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‘Fact-Checkers’ Are Technocracy’s Digital Brownshirts

We are under siege. A nihilistic fanaticism is running free among us thanks to the emergence of a journalistic “ethos” that establishes an almost complete equivalence between the “truth” and those utterances that support the strategic goals of the great economic and digital powers of our time.

A few months ago Facebook censored an article in the British Medical Journal that highlighted serious irregularities in Pfizer’s clinical vaccine trials. Then two weeks ago, fact-checkers from the Spanish websites Newtral and Maldita burst into the public square to accuse professor of Pharmacology, renowned expert in drug safety, and ex-WHO adviser, Joan Ramón Laporte of foisting lies and disinformation onto the Spanish populace. This, in reaction to Laporte’s testimony before a Spanish parliamentary commission investigating the country’s vaccination effort.

Despite his towering credentials, his intervention was quickly tarred as problematic by the media and subsequently banned by YouTube. The crime of this new Galileo Galilei? Alerting the assembled parliamentarians to the existence of grave procedural irregularities in the trials for the vaccines, and questioning the wisdom of a health strategy that aims to inject every Spanish child over the age of six with a new, poorly tested, and largely ineffective medication.

This incident reveals that the fact-checkers will attack anyone who does not accept the truth as dictated by the great economic and government centers of the world. This is not the usual official media obfuscation to which we’ve become accustomed over the years, but rather a brazen McCarthyist intimidation device, designed to frighten citizens into submission by appealing to their lowest and most ignoble instincts, an approach lain bare in Maldita’s smug and Manichaean slogan: “Join and support us in our battle against lies.”

Under this harsh binary logic, an internationally famous scientist like Laporte is not even given the opportunity to be judged wrong or misguided in good faith. Rather, he is immediately accused of being a willful and dangerous liar who must be immediately banished from public view.

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Judge Allows Former Deputy Accused of Raping 14-Year-Old Girl to Avoid Prison and Sex Offender Status

After striking a plea deal with prosecutors, a onetime Tennessee sheriff’s deputy who was accused of repeatedly raping a 14-year-old girl over a period of 20 months will serve no time in prison and does not have to register as a sex offender.

Brian O. Beck, 47, pleaded guilty to a single count of aggravated assault on Monday, according to court records filed in Shelby County Court. That plea was part of a deal between Beck and prosecutors, a member of the Shelby County District Attorney General’s Office confirmed to Law&Crime.

The judge in the case suspended Beck’s nominal four-year prison sentence and said the defendant would instead serve three years probation, a sentencing order provided to Law&Crime by the prosecutor’s office indicates. If Beck fails to live up to the terms of his probation, he could be incarcerated for the aforementioned four-year term, according to the probation order itself and a statement from the prosecutor’s office to a local television station. The order also requires Beck to serve 150 hours of community service, submit to random drug screening, and have no contact with the victim.

The judge’s order, in essence a perfunctory form document with boxes to check and a few blank lines to fill, offers but a glimpse into the reasoning behind the moves.

The document says “the defendant is not likely again to engage in a criminal course of conduct” — at least “to the satisfaction of the Court” — and that “the ends of justice and the welfare of society do not require that the Defendant shall presently suffer the penalty imposed by law by incarceration.”

Judge Lee Coffee signed off on the document.

Beck will also not have to register as a sex offender, according to the order.

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The WHO is working on a global vaccine passport system

The World Health Organization will meet with member states and reps from vaccine certification credentials groups to discuss a global vaccine certification system.

Over the last two years, vaccine passports have become compulsory for international travel in some countries.

However, different regions and countries have different standards when it comes to proof of vaccination, meaning a passport that is verifiable in one country might not be verifiable in the other.

The World Health Organization wants to get involved in pulling it all together under a global system.

The WHO says it wants to create a “trust framework,” which will allow the verification of a vaccine passport anywhere in the world, co-founder of the Vaccination Credential Institute (VCI) Brain Anderson told POLITICO.

VCI is the group behind SMART Health Cards, which have been widely adopted in the US, and have become the de facto vaccine credentials standard.

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The State Took Their Children For 467 Days After An Alleged Slight. Now The Family Is Suing.

A family is suing the state of Illinois, a child welfare investigator contracted by the state, and others, alleging their three children were taken away for more than a year over the investigator’s hurt feelings.

The Center Square reported that Jacob and Patricia Krueger’s three children were taken into custody by the Department of Children and Family Services (DFCS) in 2019 after their child was supposed to be discharged from a hospital for a complex medical issue. Aaron Rapier, the attorney representing the family, told the Center Square that Dr. Channing Petrak, the contractor for DCFS, was at the hospital and prepared to discharge the child following a year-and-a-half long investigation, but reneged after she was slighted by Jacob Krueger.

“While [Petrak] went into the meeting intending to discharge this child home to the family, which means of course that she didn’t suspect any abuse or neglect at that time, she did a complete 180 after she was embarrassed in front of a colleague,” Rapier told the outlet.

The three Krueger children are referred to as AA, BB, and CC, in the lawsuit, which was filed on January 20 in the Peoria Division of the United States District Court for the Central District of Illinois. The oldest of the Krueger children was three when they were taken from their family for more than a year, and the youngest was just three days old.

The Center Square reported that the middle child, referred to in court documents as BB, was being treated for a complex medical issue and about to be discharged when the nightmare began.

“Petrak was not BB’s doctor,” the lawsuit says. “Jacob told Defendant/Petrak he did not want her involved in BB’s care, treatment, or discharge planning. Defendant/Petrak was offended and embarrassed by Jacob’s statements. She left the room, as requested, but Defendant/Petrak was not done with the Krueger family.”

The lawsuit alleges that Petrak contacted the others named in the lawsuit and told them her investigative finding was that the child was medically abused.

Rapier, the family’s attorney, said that the family had previously endured a 17-month long investigation that had found no medical neglect of the middle child being treated, but because Petrak changed her finding at the last minute, according to the lawsuit, all three children were taken from the Krueger’s for 467 days.

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