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from the who-feels-safe-in-Florida-now? dept.
Armed police raid home of Florida scientist fired over Covid-19 data
Rebekah Jones, the Florida data scientist embroiled in a dispute with the state's Republican governor over the handling of coronavirus figures, had her home raided on Monday by armed police who confiscated her computers.
In a stream of posts on Twitter, Jones posted a video of the raid that showed state police carrying handguns escorting her out of her Tallahassee home. She can be heard saying: "He just pointed a gun at my children," with her husband and two children apparently upstairs at the time.
Jones claimed in her tweets that the raid was the work of Ron DeSantis, the governor with whom she has clashed repeatedly since she was fired by the state's department of health in May in a row over Covid-19 data. She compared the incident to sending "the gestapo", adding: "This is what happens to scientists who do their job honestly. This is what happens to people who speak truth to power."
The Florida department of law enforcement confirmed they had entered Jones's house on a search warrant. But in a statement the department said the action was related to a recent computer hack of the health department website, in which emergency response coordinators were sent an unauthorised message.
Also at CNN, The Verge, and The Hill.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Mykl on Wednesday December 09 2020, @05:38AM (7 children)
Percentages can be deceptive things.
Yes, the death rate is 111% (actually 110.63%) above the expected number. And 11% extra sounds small. But 11% of a really big number is still a big number.
Applying your logic against 9/11 - the death rate that year would've only gone up by 0.1%. Hardly worth worrying about, much less creating the TSA, Patriot Act, 2 wars and other abuses which have been far more costly and rights-infringing than wearing a mask!
Come to think of it, why do Republicans consent to taking their shoes off and being full body scanned at the airport, but refuse to wear a mask? Perhaps the COVID response would've been different if we had told them that the disease was a bio-weapon engineered by Chinese nationalist terrorists who "Hated our freedom"!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2020, @06:30AM
Runaway don't do math. This is why his log books in his trucker days always got pulled, and cited. Not that he meant to be a criminal, just too stupid to do otherwise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2020, @06:45AM (4 children)
Are you trying to say that if some of our rights were successfully stolen under a laughable pretext two decades ago, then it is all well and good to steal all that remained, with an equally contrived excuse?
Yes, politicians should have been stopped then, and thrown out of office for trying. Yes, people were stupid and complacent, PR blitz worked, democracy had failed. Yes, naturally they decided to repeat the trick that worked, now on a grander scale. No, two wrongs do not make a right.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2020, @05:04PM (3 children)
I think he is saying, that what we are dealing with now is basically a 9/11 each day.
20 years ago conservatives said that if we didn't take drastic measures to deal with the threat put forth by terrorists, we'd lose all our freedoms. As such they made flying a pain, and started a pair of wars.
Now, we are dealing with something that is killing that many people each day, and is swamping our hospital system to the point where soon it will not be able to treat all the people because there just isn't space or doctors/nurses to go around. The conservative response is, "how dare you tell me that I might need to wear a mask when out in public!" Since the science wont bend their way, they instead go after the facts, so "3 thousand people can't be dying each day, that would imply we are stupid!"
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2020, @05:24PM
4000 people are dying daily from heart disease.
9/11 was a criminal act perpetrated by people. Covid is just a disease, like all the others we always had to live with.
Hospitals are not swamped. No hospital will want to keep ICU occupancy lower than 85%, and they are required to be able to expand to at least 125%. Idaho hospitals have 15% in for covid, 54% of beds are occupied and 74% of ICU beds are. Pennsylvania: 17%, 73%, 82%. Texas: 15%, 73%, 82%. Sources: https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/its-panic-porn-clickbait-media-scare-stories-about-hospitals-are-misleading [zerohedge.com] and https://protect-public.hhs.gov/pages/hospital-capacity [hhs.gov]
Nurses are still being sent home because overall business is depressed in hospitals.
You champagne leftists can be Chicken Littles as long as you want, but your co-religionists in political power are killing this country, rich, poor, old and young, and eventually you too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2020, @06:07PM (1 child)
Let us not rewrite history. The stupidity that happened following 9/11 was 100% bipartisan. There is always token opposition to things like this, so as to pretend we don't have a uniparty, but it's always only token. For instance when Obama wanted to push the TPP through in an overtly undemocratic fashion, republicans claimed to oppose but then lined up to ensure he always had just enough for a majority when it came vote time. What the uniparty wants, the uniparty gets.
The invasion [wikipedia.org] went 296-133 in the house, with the democrats having had just enough pull to stop the invasion if they came together to vote against it. It went 77-23 in the senate. As the democrats held a majority in the senate they could have also stopped it there.
Where the government really got a hardon though was the Patriot Act [wikipedia.org], though. Taking away civil rights, further bloating the government, and enhancing domestic surveillance? Oh yeah baby, neither party can resist that sort of dirty talk. It went 357-66 in the house, and a whopping 98-1 in the senate.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday December 09 2020, @10:04PM
In the runup to the invasion of Iraq, I was the sole voice of opposition in the community I was part of. Everyone wanted to invade it seemed. I was mocked by left, and by right, as well as many Independents. "Gotta make Saddam Hussein pay!" Except, Hussein and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. "You're either with us, or against us, you TRAITOR!!"
Ditto with the Patriot Act, ditto with the whole Department of Homeland Security, ditto with the freak brigade making life miserable at the airports today. There was near unanimous support for all that idiocy. It was one of the few times in history when Ds and Rs were all kissy-face with each other.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2020, @09:48AM
I think this is a good example of why political types, on both sides, have difficulty every coming to any sort of an agreement - instead just ending up in ad hominem and other nonsense. You're saying here that percents don't matter. Imagine now somebody said that BLM is kind of bizarre since more white people, than black, are killed by police. Would you now resort to 'raw numbers don't matter, only percents' without skipping a beat, probably while simultaneously telling the other guy he was being disingenuous? In that case I'd actually agree with you, because it would be disingenuous. But in this case you're taking your turn there. Percents are all that matter - raw numbers are generally just used to mislead.
And yes, you are also absolutely right that our response to 9/11 was beyond retarded. It was politicians manipulating the *emotions* of the public to seize more power for themselves which has still not, and probably never will be, fully relinquished. And guess what's happening exactly again with COVID? A decade from now we're going to look back at all of the liberties we sacrificed, and wonder what in the world we were thinking. Do you think the "travel permits" we're creating today, will go away as COVID does? Passports, as a requirement for travel, were a "temporary war measure". So too will these travel permits be. Gradually your "travel permit" will come to be the equivalent of a domestic passport, necessary to participate in an ever widening range of activities. Oh, you smoked a joint, maybe downloaded a movie or song? Your permit is now revoked for a month - no need to even involve the courts since it's not even going to be an official government requirement, just something corporations will all voluntarily adopt. Fun times.