Tag: privilege

Hollywood Elite Privilege: Hong Kong Gov’t Grants Quarantine Exemption to Nicole Kidman to Film

The Hollywood elites have had their own set of rules for filming from California to Australia throughout the coronavirus pandemic, a double standard that sets them apart from working Americans. A-list actress Nicole Kidman is just the latest example of this Hollywood privilege.

Hong Kong’s government said Thursday a quarantine exemption has been given to an individual to perform “designated professional work” in the former British colony, the Associated press reports.

It came with news the Australian actress did not have to spend time in quarantine when she arrived in the city to film a new Amazon Prime Video series called Expats.

“The case in discussion has been granted permission to travel to Hong Kong with a quarantine exemption for the purpose of performing designated professional work, taking into account that it is conducive to maintaining the necessary operation and development of Hong Kong’s economy,” the government said in a statement, without identifying Kidman by name.

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One Rule For Us… Google Co-Founder Allowed To Enter Country With Closed Border While Others, Including Citizens, Were Blocked

Billionaire Google Co-founder Larry Page, who has been isolating from the rest of the world by buying remote Fijian islands, was granted access to enter New Zealand, while practically everyone else was barred from entering the country, it has emerged.

Page reportedly sought medical treatment for his twelve year old son earlier this year in the country’s capital Aukland.

While even New Zealand citizens and permanent residents of the country were barred from entering without facing a raft of restrictions, including  spending two weeks at a government quarantine facility, Page was allowed to just walk right in.

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‘I Caused the Death’: Cop With Beer in Car, Admits He Killed Woman in Crash, NOT Arrested or Fired

In June of 2020, Sgt. Ryan Hartman was drinking and driving when we stopped “paying attention” and crashed into a car occupied by Jennifer Miller and her life partner, Pam Watts. The crash would put Watts in the hospital and her partner in the ground. It has been over a year since Hartman killed Miller and not only have police refused to arrest him, but he’s back on duty.

This is not some case with no evidence or disputed facts. According to body camera footage that was released this week, Hartman admitted that his lack of attention caused Miller’s death and police found an open Dos Equis beer in his truck.

“I caused the death of somebody buy me not paying attention,” Hartman says according to the newly released video. According to a search warrant carried out on Hartman’s phone after the crash, he was using his phone whilst drinking a beer.

Despite finding a beer can in his truck and admitting that he caused Miller’s death, Hartman was not arrested that day — or any day after. Instead, he was put on paid vacation for five months while his office “investigated” the crash. Hartman received blue privilege from the start.

After the crash, Hartman refused a breathalyzer and police waited over eight hours to get a warrant for a blood draw. Since so much time had passed after the crash, Hartman still had alcohol in his system but his levels had fallen below the legal limit.

Highlighting the nature of Hartman’s blue privilege was the fact that the neighboring department who responded to the crash, the Lockhart Police Department, recommended charges of negligent homicide. However, the investigation was turned over to Hartman’s department, the San Marcos Police Department.

That investigation was subsequently passed to Bastrop County District Attorney Bryan Goertz, who chose not to send Hartman’s case before a grand jury.

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NO JAIL for Police Chief Caught Stealing 3,000 Bags of Heroin from Evidence Room

In the land of the free, there are two sets of justice systems — one for all those connected to that system, and one for everyone else. Time after time, we’ve seen police officers and politicians alike accused of terrible crimes and they escape with little to no jail. As the following case illustrates, police chiefs can betray everything they stand for, steal tens of thousands of dollars in heroin from their own department and face no jail.

The former Elizabeth Borough police chief, Timothy Butler, pleaded guilty to stealing heroin from the department’s evidence room but he will not go to jail. Instead of jail, Butler was sentenced to 55 months probation and 325 hours of community service.

In August, Butler pleaded guilty to two counts of theft, one count of possession and one count of obstructing the administration of law. The sheer amount of heroin found in Butler’s possession makes the one count of possession outright laughable.

According to police, Butler was arrested last year after they found more than 60 bundles of heroin and 3,230 individual “stamp bags” (given this name for being the size of a stamp and individually packaged for resale) in and around his desk — inside his police chief office.

Clearly he was unconcerned with hiding it because after all, he was the top cop. According to the criminal complaint, when asked how bad the evidence problem was, Butler said, “it was all gone.”

Had Butler not been a police officer, rest assured that he would have received a far harsher sentence than just probation. Indeed, many will argue — and rightfully so — that Butler should face harsher sentencing due to the betrayal of his duties as the top cop.

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CNN’s Defense of Chris Cuomo’s Special COVID Privileges is Grotesque

Ever since the COVID pandemic subsumed most countries on the planet, there have been numerous scandals and controversies relating to those who corruptly obtain medical privileges and other exemptions unavailable to ordinary citizens. These scandals typically arise when someone uses their wealth, power or connections to jump in front of others for access to potentially life-saving procedures or medications or grant themselves and their friends license to ignore what everyone else must endure.

Right now in Brazil, for instance, there is a burgeoning scandal from reports that a group of businesspeople with ties to the government arranged to purchase their own private stash of vaccines for use for themselves, families and friends in violation of the law. In the U.S., people were outraged when very young members of Congress were among the first to receive the vaccine (though the law permitted them to do so); those young Congressmembers justified their line-jumping on the ground that they were doing so selflessly to encourage others. Meanwhile, other members of Congress refused this privilege on the ground, as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) put it, that it is “shameful” for young lawmakers to believe they “are more important” than workers. Repeatedly in the U.S., politicians were caught exempting themselves from lockdown orders they were imposing on everyone else.

But those pale in comparison to the abuse of power by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) and his brother, CNN host Chris Cuomo, as reported on Wednesday by The Albany-Times Union and The Washington Post. “High-level members of the state Department of Health were directed last year by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker to conduct prioritized coronavirus testing on the governor’s relatives as well as influential people with ties to the administration,” reported the Times-Union. “Members of Cuomo’s family including his brother, his mother and at least one of his sisters were also tested by top health department officials — some several times,” it added.

In particular, Gov. Cuomo abused state resources to ensure that his then-49-year-old brother, Chris, received fast COVID testing at a time when tests were very scarce. “The CNN anchor was swabbed by a top New York Department of Health doctor, who visited his Hamptons home to collect samples from him and his family,” The Post reported. The article also contains these damning details:

The same doctor who tested Chris Cuomo, Eleanor Adams, now a top adviser to the state health commissioner, also was enlisted to test multiple other Cuomo family members….The coronavirus test specimens were then rushed — at times driven by state police troopers — to the Wadsworth Center, a state public health lab in Albany, where they were processed immediately, the people said. At times, employees in the state health laboratory were kept past their shifts until late into the night to process results of those close to Cuomo, two people said.

All of this commandeering of state resources to provide the CNN host with very specialized medical attention occurred while “media reports were full of accounts from New Yorkers desperate to get tested — including some with symptoms and recent travel history who were turned away because of scarcity.”

For more than a year now, CNN’s promotion of “interviews” conducted by Chris Cuomo of his own brother — in which the CNN host repeatedly heaped lavish praise on Gov. Cuomo and even hyped him as a presidential contender while the Governor was corruptly and possibly criminally covering up COVID deaths — was one of the most glaring breaches of journalistic ethics imaginable. It was not cute or charming. It was corrupt. And it aggressively deceived CNN’s audience. That they knew it was corrupt was evidenced by the CNN host’s recent announcement that he would not cover his brother’s recent scandals: what conceivable framework makes it journalistically permissible for a news host to shower his own brother with praise, but then not cover his scandals?

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