There has been plenty of discussion about the federal government’s CovidSAFE contact tracing app today. I won’t download it, but I respect the rights of others to do so if they want.
The app itself is relatively benign in the amount of information it gathers, but the model requiring a centralised database concerns me especially considering Apple/Google’s planned version doesn’t require a centralised database. My bigger concern is this is a first step in getting people to voluntarily sign up to full-time government tracking, and once people are conditioned to accept that (and plenty already are) it’s only a matter of time before the scope of such tracking will increase and become compulsory. Warrantless surveillance isn’t much further along the line once you sign up to tracking.
The “cure” is worse than the disease in this case. On principle I simply can’t voluntarily download this app.
There’s an argument that Facebook etc has more information about me than this app can get. This is true to an extent. I have some level of control over how much I share with them, I avoid using Google almost entirely, and I keep location services turned off in my phone when I’m not actively using it, which limits the ability for apps to track my movements (you would be amazed how many apps try to take location data every time you open them!) so I’m already opting out of various levels of corporate surveillance.
Paranoid? Sure! But it’s reasonable to be paranoid when there’s always someone or something that wants to watch. And my phone battery almost doesn’t hold a charge any more, but I can double my battery life with location services and Bluetooth switched off, so my paranoia brings practical benefits too.
Samuel
April 27th, 2020 at 12:48pm
George Pell “appeal allowed, convictions quashed” Chief Justice Susan Kiefel has announced. Correct outcome based on the flimsy evidence which seemed to be presented in the prosecution, although I certainly think George Pell had a hand in covering up other abuse and that will forever be a stain on his character and that of the Catholic Church organisation.
Still, George Pell, like the rest of us, has the right to a fair trial and the High Court has effectively concluded that the process was not conducted fairly. It is a great tragedy for both George Pell and all of the alleged victims that the process has played out in this way and dragged on for so many years.
I have no doubt that the alleged victims were victims of someone and something, and perhaps their memories of events weren’t as clear by the time the matters got to court as they once were. I hope that they and their families can find some sort of comfort and peace in future. I also hope that there can be a good side-effect from this case and others that, in future, these sort of cases come to light quickly and allow the evidence to be fresh, giving everyone a better chance for a fair outcome.
From a legal standpoint of a system where you are innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt, I am relieved that Justice Kiefel has handed down this finding.
I had a good feeling about Justice Kiefel when I watched her be sworn in as a High Court justice in 2007. This is good news for due process. A very good job by the High Court and great day for the presumption of innocence until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt, the cornerstone of our legal process which underpins so many of our civil liberties.
Samuel
April 7th, 2020 at 10:20am
Tired of every bit of news in the world being about the Chinese Bioweapon? Same here, which makes it even stranger that I haven’t written about anything else this week.
Here’s a snapshot of some other news of note to break the monotony.
Dog learns to drive, leads to high speed pursuit
A resident of the western US state of Washington was arrested following a high-speed chase that left officers dumbfounded after they found the man’s pit bull behind the wheel.
The incident unfolded Sunday afternoon after police received calls about a driver hitting two vehicles in an area south of Seattle and then speeding away, state trooper Heather Axtman told AFP.
She said the emergency services subsequently got multiple calls about a car traveling erratically at more than 100 miles per hours (160 kilometers per hour).
Axtman said that as officers gave chase, they got close to the vehicle — a 1996 Buick — and were shocked to see a pit bull in the driver’s seat and a man steering and pushing the gas pedal from the passenger side.
The pursuit ended after police deployed spike strips and arrested 51-year-old Alberto Tito Alejandro, who was booked on multiple felonies including driving under the influence of drugs.
“When we took him into custody… he admitted to our troopers that he was trying to teach his dog to drive,” Axtman said.
(h/t Yahoo News and AFP)
The dog was not charged.
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Robot can read minds. It’s touted as a took to help the speech-impaired regain their speech, but the other obvious uses are terrifying
An artificial intelligence can accurately translate thoughts into sentences, at least for a limited vocabulary of 250 words. The system may bring us a step closer to restoring speech to people who have lost the ability because of paralysis.
Joseph Makin at the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues used deep learning algorithms to study the brain signals of four women as they spoke. The women, who all have epilepsy, already had electrodes attached to their brains to monitor seizures.
Across the four women, the AI’s best performance was an average translation error rate of 3 per cent.
(h/t New Scientist)
Thought crimes here we come.
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Pestilence time!
Rampaging monkeys stealing drinks in Thailand
Bats fall from the sky in Israel
More rampaging monkeys, this time in India
Locusts attack Africa and the Middle East
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US Justice Department wants to track down and punish the robocallers who threaten to arrest you unless you pay an imaginary tax bill
“Many of the robocalls were made by foreign fraudsters impersonating government investigators and conveying alarming messages, such as: the recipient’s Social Security number or other personal information has been compromised or otherwise connected to criminal activity; the recipient faces imminent arrest; the recipient’s assets are being frozen; the recipient’s bank and credit accounts have suspect activity; the recipient’s benefits are being stopped; the recipient faces imminent deportation; or combinations of these threats,” the Justice Department said in an announcement.
“Each of these claims was a lie, designed to scare the call recipient into paying large sums of money. These calls led to massive financial losses to elderly and other vulnerable victims throughout the United States.”
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York entered orders in two separate civil actions that bar eight individuals and companies from “continuing to facilitate the transmission of massive volumes of fraudulent robocalls to consumers.”
(h/t World Net Daily)
That’s all well and good, but verifying the source of calls on an international phone network is pretty much impossible, and the scammers have proven that any time they get blocked they just change the route their calls take. The only way to effectively stop it is real-time monitoring of the content of the calls, and that’s not something the phone companies or the government have the resources to do, and the invasion of privacy outweighs the benefits significantly.
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Many places which preach “mental health” tout Yoga as a path to a better mind, but is Yoga really worth the risk to your soul?
3. Spiritual deception: There is a satanic influence behind the practice of yoga. The “power” unleashed through the practice of yoga is called the “kundalini” (meaning serpent power). Yet a serpent is a symbol of Satan (see Gen. 3, Rev. 12).
4. Spiritual transfer: Serious students of yoga usually desire something called shaktipat (a guru’s power to transmit a spiritual awakening of the kundalini). Yet this is nothing more than the transference of a demon spirit. It can result when the word “OM” is chanted, or by assuming various yoga postures that are dedicated to Hindu deities.
6. Spiritual endorsement: Even if a yoga class is seemingly benign with no spiritual emphasis and no Hindu trappings; and the teachers are Christian and Christian worship music is played, still, by participating in a “yoga” class, Christians are endorsing a non-Christian belief system. That is wrong and an insult to the Lord Jesus Christ.
(h/t Charisma News)
It became obvious to me that there was an evil force pushing Yoga in this world when suddenly over the last couple of years, workplaces started encouraging it and running lunchtime sessions at the same time that various psychologists all started to promote it, and all of them in unisen without being prompted, had as their first selling point “it’s not a religious activity”. Most religious folk would see straight through that, but the non-religious are the ones who are truly vulnerable here. They don’t believe in demons so they don’t know when they’re being influenced or used by them, and they have no idea how much Yoga activities open them up to being used. People who believe have a chance to recognise the signs of demon attack and defend themselves against it, but the non-believers get used without knowing it, and the damage they can unwittingly inflict on the world in that state is immense.
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And some good news from the Mythical Man Made Global Warming alarmists. Even their attempts to explain why the earth isn’t warming the way their models predicted just end up proving they have no idea what’s going on.
If we accept the study, climate models calibrated against pre-1980 temperatures are running way too hot, because in the pre-1980s period the anthropogenic global warming signature was being augmented by the deterioration of the ozone layer.
I’m not talking about a small calibration error. if the ozone layer recovery is strong enough to stop southern warming in its tracks the expansion of the Hadley Cell and contraction of the jetstream, given the vast amount of CO2 we have dumped into the atmosphere in the last 20 years, then the deterioration of the ozone layer in the years leading up to the 1980s may have contributed substantially to the pre-1980s observed warming.
On the other hand, accepting the study means accepting that two powerful opposing forcings can almost perfectly balance each other for two decades when they move into opposition to each other. It is not impossible that two independent forcings have the same magnitude, but it is not terribly likely either. The easiest way to explain two powerful independent opposed forcings which just happen to perfectly balance each other, without the uncomfortable coincidence of perfect balance, is to assume neither forcing actually exists.
(h/t Watts Up With That)
Natural cycles, just as those of us who follow empirical evidence rather than outcomes of models have been saying for years.
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So there you go, a snapshot of other news around the world. It might be hard to find when every news outlet in the world seems to be focussing entirely on one story, but it’s there if you look hard enough. And it’s important to look, because it’s usually in times of distraction that some of the most egregious news in the world slips through unnoticed.
Samuel
April 1st, 2020 at 05:22am
It is interesting and terrifying to see how quickly we have effectively become a socialist dictatorship in Australia, and in many countries around the world, all because of fear that the Chinese Bioweapon COVID-19 is going to kill us all if we mingle in groups and fail to disinfect every surface in the world. It can be argued that saving lives is a noble pursuit, and that is certainly the rationale being used to lock us all down and launch great swathes of socialist fiscal policy, but is it the real reason?
Official statistics show that about 5% of people who catch the dreaded Chinese lurgy will die. 5% mortality rate is quite an alarming number. But is it accurate? Well, no, it is a lie.
According to Prof Walter Ricciardi, scientific adviser to Italy’s minister of health [..] Italy’s death rate may also appear high because of how doctors record fatalities.
“The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus.
“On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity – many had two or three,” he says.
(h/t Sarah Lee at Red State)
In plain English, this means that of the people who caught COVID-19 and subsequently died, only 12% of them actually died from COVID-19. The other 88% died from pre-existing conditions and just happened to have COVID-19…it may have made them more unwell than they already were, but they were already vulnerable due to their underlying health conditions and ANY extra illness could have had the same effect.
So, only 12% of people who catch COVID-19 and subsequently die can have their deaths attributed to COVID-19. Let’s use round numbers to make this a bit easier and call it 10% or one tenth. This means the mortality rate from catching COVID-19 isn’t 5%, but 0.5%, which makes it roughly what you would expect from a bad flu season, especially one where a new strain is prevalent and people haven’t grown an immunity yet.
But as the saying goes “never let a good crisis go to waste”. (This is widely attributed to Rahm Emanuel, due to him saying it while Chief Of Staff to the worst President in American history, Barack Obama, but it has been used by many people before and after him, so he doesn’t really deserve all the credit for it)
Those who would push for control are using this crisis incredibly well. New South Wales and Victoria have effectively placed their states under house arrest with a very limited list of reasons why you can go outside, with almost identical rules in both states:
Under the order, “a person must not, without reasonable excuse, leave the person’s place of residence”.
The NSW Government Gazette lists acceptable excuses as: obtaining food or other goods and services; travelling for work or education if the person cannot do it at home; exercise; and medical or caring reasons.
In addition, the order directs that people must not gather in groups of more than two people in public places, exceptions include: gatherings of members of the same household, and gatherings essential for work or education.
(h/t Nadine Morton at The Canberra Times)
There has been video of police forcing people to leave parks and other public places, even if they were keeping their distance from each other. Jog in a park? OK, unless it’s a group. Sit in a park? Naughty, prison for you!
Prison? Why, yes. Back to Nadine’s article:
NSW residents face up to six months in jail and a $11,000 fine if they leave their home without a “reasonable excuse” after tough new restrictions started on Tuesday.
Here’s a question worth asking. If you own more than one property, does it matter which one you choose to isolate yourself in? Apparently it does…of course, because the socialist model confines you to the zone which is assigned to you.
Chief Minister Andrew Barr has labelled anybody considering heading to the South Coast as ”extraordinarily selfish” in the current health emergency, even if they have a holiday home there.
(h/t Ian Bushnell at The RiotACT)
The ACT Chief Minister goes on with some tortured logic about south coast hospitals not having the capacity to deal with extra people, but that makes no sense given the almost national state of house arrest applies to healthy people as well as the sick, and people are being urged to keep away from each other to avoid the Chinese Bioweapon spreading further, so it actually makes sense for people to get out of a city with a dense population and spread out around the country if they can. But what does logic matter when the socialist dictators are in charge and the masses have been trained to go along with whatever authoritarian dictate are handed down to remove their liberties. The comments on that article are almost entirely in agreement with Barr, and denouncing anyone who has a differing viewpoint.
But, all of these people believe that by following the authoritarian dictates, they are saving lives. They don’t know the truth of the statistics which I noted above, and even if they were told they either wouldn’t care or wouldn’t believe it, but the socialist Premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews certainly knows the truth and isn’t letting a good crisis go to waste. He is being careful with his statements so that if people realise the truth, he can’t, in months ahead, be accused of claiming this was all about saving lives.
In order to avoid the distressing scenes we now are seeing around the world, National Cabinet has agreed to significant new restrictions on public gatherings and will also enforce that where people can stay at home, they must stay at home.
(Statement by Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, 30 March 2020)
It’s not about saving lives, it’s about preventing hurt feelings. This is the same argument the socialists have used against freedom of speech. But if the bar for action is as low as hurt feelings, there’s is no end to the actions governments can take and how authoritarian they can become.
Take a look at Western Australia for a clue as to what is coming next:
From midnight Tuesday, West Australians will no longer be allowed to move around the state unless considered an essential worker.
The state will operate more like nine small countries, with random checkpoints and roadblocks at the borders of each zone.
Anyone caught crossing borders without a valid reason will be fined $1000.
(h/t 7News.com.au)
The great socialist model of giving everyone a zone and making them stay there unless the state gives them authority to move. At the moment it’s a few zones within states, but why do you think houses in cities are being torn up and replaced with apartment complexes where the bottom couple of floors are business space? Because once enough people are in blocks where the shops and businesses they need are all within walking distance, they can be forced to stay within their little zone. Make the roads harder to use by increasing petrol taxes, incentivising electric vehicles with seriously limited range, and making public transport seem more attractive in comparison (all of those trams running through corridors of apartment blocks, hmmm) and suddenly the state has control over where people go. First, by encouraging people to travel how the state wants them to travel, and then later once enough people are on-board to cheerlead, so to speak, the choices start to get removed.
But in order for any socialist scheme like this to work, people need to be dependent on something from the state, that way if people don’t comply, they can have that thing removed…the threat of which will keep most in line. The most obvious thing is income. Australia is already working on banning cash, with the limit on cash transactions being brought down to $10,000 already, and now stores are being encouraged to not accept cash because it might be dirty and carry the dreaded Chinese Bioweapon. When transactions are all electronic, the state can see everything, and it’s a short step to controlling everything. The federal government has talked about expanding the trial of a cashless welfare card to a national rollout for all government welfare recipients. The cashless welfare card allows the government to control what you can spend your money on, with the majority of the card’s contents being locked down to “essential items”.
One of the effects of the great panic over the Chinese Bioweapon COVID-19 is that the economy is slowing down and people are losing their jobs. As a result, people are turning to the government for financial assistance. The JobSeeker allowance has been doubled and all requirements to look for work while receiving it have been cancelled, making it rather attractive to just not work. But to receive that, you have to apply for it. There’s a more insidious plan being implemented which will make most working Australians dependent on a government income without having any say over it…the JobKeeper allowance. This is a $1,500 per fortnight payment which will be made to employees through their employers. The employer is the one that applies for it if they have seen a reduction in revenue this year, and uses it to subsidise the pay of all of their employees (the employees have no say in it). It’s supposed to be a short-term measure to keep people employed and allow businesses to close temporarily without having to fire everyone, however the tricky detail is that if an employee was earning less than $1,500 per fortnight before the JobKeeper allowance came in to existence, they must be paid the full allowance, meaning they get a pay rise from it.
So, here we have people out of work having their pay doubled and not even having to look for work, and people on low incomes getting a pay rise. It is unfathomable that these measures will be temporary. There would be riots if, in six months time, the government turns around and cuts pay rates back to their old levels. This is dependence by design. It might get scaled back slightly, but it won’t go away completely.
Now, think about this in terms of control. If the government puts in place a system where people who don’t work get $1,000 per fortnight and people in work have the first $1,500 per fortnight of their pay come from the government, we effectively have a Universal Basic Income, and all of a sudden the government has much more control over everyone as they have the ability to punish people for non-compliance by reducing or removing the government-paid portion of their income. To fund this type of system, taxes have to increase to extraordinary levels, making it not very worthwhile to try to earn more than what the government is paying, meaning that for most people they will get what the government is paying and very little else, and therefore be beholden to the dictates of the government, lest their income be halved for non-compliance.
Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote “they who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety” is especially apt. The left, of course, recognises the fundamental truth in this saying is a threat to their desire for dictatorial control over everything and thus has tried to claim in recent years that Franklin meant the opposite of what he said, which is complete nonsense of course.
The writing is on the wall as our society seems to be welcoming the promise of safety by giving up liberty. In the end, they will get neither. It might be too late to turn the tide back towards liberty right now, and indeed I fear we are headed for a dreadful era of authoritarian socialism and mass misery, but every little bit of pushback and consistent argument for liberty now will have some small impact now, and help to make it easier to return to a liberated society in times ahead, reducing the duration of the tyranny.
Liberty is well-worth the fight.
Samuel
April 1st, 2020 at 01:03am