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Pre-Crime: Victorian Government Pushes for Powers to Preemptively Arrest Anyone, Even If They Haven’t Broken the Law

Imprisoned

Mainstream media are finally reporting on the Victorian government’s new bill to hand authorities the power to arrest anyone, even if they have not committed an offence.

10 News Melbourne reports: “[The] new law would give police the power to preemptively detain anyone with COVID or their close contacts even if they haven’t broken the law. All that’s required is that the officer thinks they might breach restrictions in the future.”

The report notes that the Health Department could also empower non-police, such as Public Safety Officers or Work Safe Inspectors, to preemptively detain citizens.

The new legislation places “no limit on detention time, no legislative oversight and no clear avenue for appeal.” Those detained could be placed in quarantine facilities to be monitored by authorities.

The law could see the arrest, not only of anyone the state deems a “conspiracy theorist” and therefore likely to neglect current restrictions, but also their family members and close contacts even if a crime has not been committed.

(Tom: Someone should tell these would be tyrants that this contravenes the basic legal premises on which our society is founded – most notably Magna Carta and Habeus Corpus and the English Bill of Rights.)

https://caldronpool.com/pre-crime-victorian-government-pushes-for-powers-to-preemptively-arrest-anyone-even-if-they-havent-broken-the-law/

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Coffee Can Cause or Contribute To

I am sometimes asked for my thoughts on coffee. Since I have never drunk it I do not have valid first-hand experience but this comes from a personal trainer who loves the stuff!

One commenter added: Too much caffeine is bad for the nervous system and those trying to heal a leaking gut need to avoid it totally until their gut is healed! Caffeine can irritate a “leaky gut” or inflamed gut!

Coffee Can Cause or Contribute To
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Lockdown Questions

Lockdown Questions

I fully endorse the strategy of allowing the vulnerable to protect themselves and the able to be free to live their lives without suppression.

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Sweet Advice from Maria Sabina

Maria Sabina

Sweet advice from Maria Sabina, Mexican curandera (medicine woman) and poet.

“Cure yourself with the light of the sun and the rays of the moon. With the sound of the river and the waterfall.

With the swaying of the sea and the fluttering of birds.

Heal yourself with mint, with neem and eucalyptus.

Sweeten yourself with lavender, rosemary, and chamomile.

Hug yourself with the cocoa bean and a touch of cinnamon.

Put love in tea instead of sugar, and take it looking at the stars.

Heal yourself with the kisses that the wind gives you and the hugs of the rain.

Get strong with bare feet on the ground and with everything that is born from it.

Get smarter every day by listening to your intuition, looking at the world with the eye of your forehead.

Jump, dance, sing, so that you live happier.

Heal yourself, with beautiful love, and always remember… YOU are the medicine.”

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Truth to Power – Could COVID-19 Have Escaped from a Lab?

Alina Chan

(Tom: This is a great read about a scientist-turned-detective with a level of ethics that matches her competence in biology. Well worth the read! Executive summary: The seafood-market theory, which Chinese health officials and the World Health Organization espoused in the early days of the pandemic, was wrong. The virus was lab engineered.)

“There’s long been a sense that if the public and politicians really knew about the dangerous pathogen research being conducted in many laboratories, they’d be outraged. Denying the possibility of a catastrophic incident like this, then, could be seen as a form of career preservation [for scientists]. ‘For the substantial subset of virologists who perform gain-of-function research,’ Richard Ebright, a Rutgers microbiologist and another founding member of the Cambridge Working Group, told me, ‘avoiding restrictions on research funding, avoiding implementation of appropriate biosafety standards, and avoiding implementation of appropriate research oversight are powerful motivators. Antonio Regalado, biomedicine editor of MIT Technology Review, put it more bluntly. If it turned out COVID-19 came from a lab, he tweeted, ‘it would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom.’”

https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2020/09/09/alina-chan-broad-institute-coronavirus/

Finish reading:

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Create!

Kurt Vonnegut

(Tom: Golly gee gosh I love this advice! It is so good I am sharing it again. If you get a fraction as much from it as I got your day will be immeasurably enhanced.

Take joy in some creation today!)

The point is not to Win, but to do, to experience, to become.

With thanks to Vera Risdon and Kurt Vonnegut.

In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write a famous author and ask for advice. Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to respond – and his response is magnificent:

“Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!

Kurt Vonnegut”

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Nuremberg code turns 60

Bioethics experts Paul Weindling and Volker Roelcke suggest that current bioethical thinking may use an incomplete picture of the historical context of the Nuremberg code. Volker Roelcke writes: “rather than being the result of a coercive state, Nazi medicine illustrates how medical researchers and their representative bodies […] co-operated with and even manipulated a totalitarian state and political system relying on expert opinion, in order to gain resources for the conduct of research without any moral and legal regulation.” He states that Nazi doctors “followed the intrinsic logic of their scientific disciplines and used the legally and ethically unrestricted access to human beings created by the context of the political system and the conditions of war.”4 By centring exclusively on the war crimes and not on their broader context, the judges at Nuremberg issued the code in order solely to set the boundaries for “permissible experiments” and tackle the difficult question of the biomedical research conducted on human subjects outside Germany during the war. The court thus failed to produce a broader legal doctrine protecting individuals against harm induced by scientific practices at large, including not only human beings as subjects of medical experiments but also as consumers and beneficiaries of science’s outcomes.

https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/85/8/07-045443/en/

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‘Dry’ Humour

I saw a post that said Victorians have lost confidence in the Premier.
I thought to myself,
‘That’s gotta be the greatest understatement since Noah’s neighbour leaned over the fence and said to him, “Bit wet this year Noah! Gonna be hard to get the washing dry.”‘