Canadian regimes: emphatic power schemes with ingenious procedures, born and molded to practice and cover up genocide and crimes against humanity. By Palestine Chronicle Staff: The Canadian government has submitted a
letter to the International Criminal Court (ICC), in which it declared
support for the Israeli position, thus rejecting the ICC jurisdiction
over cases of alleged war crimes committed by Israel in Palestine.
The
Canadian Jewish News (CJN), which reported on the letter, said that
Ottawa has communicated its position to the Court on February 14,
although the content of the letter has not been made public until today.
Canada could be investigated for genocide after MMIW report
In the letter, Canada, which reminded the Court that its “financial
contribution to the ICC will be $10.6 million this year,” stated that it
does not recognize Palestine as a state and that the ICC has no
jurisdiction on the case that is presented by the State of Palestine.
The
Canadian decision followed a public demand last December by Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Canadian Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau to condemn a preliminary report by the ICC that has a
“reasonable basis” to investigate Israeli war crimes in the occupied
territories.
Netanyahu’s letter, which was obtained by the
Canadian Globe and Mail newspaper, asserted the position which was
eventually adopted by the Canadian government, that the ICC has no
jurisdiction over the case because Palestine does not meet the criteria
of statehood.
RT - Canadian governments the Duplessis horror...
In the letter, Canada, which reminded the Court that its “financial
contribution to the ICC will be $10.6 million this year,” stated that it
does not recognize Palestine as a state and that the ICC has no
jurisdiction on the case that is presented by the State of Palestine.
The
Canadian decision followed a public demand last December by Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Canadian Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau to condemn a preliminary report by the ICC that has a
“reasonable basis” to investigate Israeli war crimes in the occupied
territories.
Powerful As God - The Canadian Governments and CAS of Ontario
Netanyahu’s letter, which was obtained by the Canadian Globe and Mail newspaper, asserted the position which was eventually adopted by the Canadian government, that the ICC has no jurisdiction over the case because Palestine does not meet the criteria of statehood.
Netanyahu’s letter read in part:
“In light of our special relations and the steadfast friendship between our countries, I urge you to publicly condemn this erroneous decision, to acknowledge there is not a Palestinian state, that the court has no jurisdiction in this matter, which involves political issues to be determined by the parties, and to voice your deep concerns regarding its dangerous ramifications to the court and the region.”
The intense Israeli lobbying followed a statement by the ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, in which she declared to be “satisfied that there is a reasonable basis to proceed with an investigation into the situation in Palestine”.
“In brief, I am satisfied that war crimes have been or are being committed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip,” she said.
Two days after Ottawa communicated its position to the ICC, Netanyahu praised what he called “efforts” by “friendly states” to prevent the ICC from launching an investigation.
(The Palestine Chronicle)
Beasts!After all the pain that we feel After all those wound's that never heal... After all those year's and tear's that we cry, do you think you'll find a place to hide...?
The use of the judicial system for political persecution
Last week, a meeting of personalities was held at the European Parliament headquarters in Brussels to present on the subject of LAWFARE (use of the judicial system for political persecution). This issue has become very effective in recent years as a result of the legal persecution undertaken against progressive leaders, especially in our continent. In this meeting, José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, former president of Honduras, was overthrown by the Military Coup of June 28, 2009. “Lawfare is a weapon against the people”: Manuel Zelaya Rosales
The event could go unnoticed, but the extreme Spanish right, entrenched in the Holy Inquisition, demonized the event, motivated by the presence of Carles Puidgemont, a Catalan politician, exiled in Belgium. The positions of Manuel Zelaya, both in his brief presentation, and in subsequent interviews, bring much clarity to the discussion on the issue of judicial persecution, used by the right as a weapon to dismantle the progress of progressivism in the world, especially in America Latin
It is imperative to have a clear and totalizing vision of this matter, and that Zelaya has proposed. First, because Lawfare as a weapon has always existed, and is used against the people who seek their liberation. It is thanks to the legal apparatus of the bourgeois state, that they incarcerate peasants, students and workers without merit. That repressive structure uses elites to justify repression against those who demand land, or free education. The laws in our countries are devoted to private property, to the (theoretical) preservation of the free market, and relegate human beings to a second or third level. "Operation Condor Criminal Pact"
Hence, Zelaya's other statement: "Lawfare has always existed, and will continue to exist as long as the capitalist system exists." Specifically, the legal bodies that regulate our societies are deeply conservative (as they are supposed to be), and we cannot expect them to play in favor of popular interests, for many changes that we propose. These are coercive devices that complement the monopoly of force held by elites and their transnational partners.
Nothing will change if the correlation of forces does not change. And changing that implies understanding that we must adopt another path in the economic field. Every day it is clearer in the world that the right loses its masks one by one. And it is logical, because it is extremely complicated to convince people that aspiring to free quality education, free health, housing and work is bad for the whole society. This makes the logic of the elections lose value, and there are increasingly frequent social shocks.
Of course, Zelaya puts his finger on the sore when he says that Lawfare is applied to former presidents for "being Bolivarian, for being friends with Cuba and Fidel ...", that claim of a sovereignty that is alien to the right, but that in the imaginary of its spokesmen it constitutes an affront to its power, and that must be punished without reservations, with all the possible rigor. It is clear that Lawfare does not seek justice, but to strike hard blows to progressivism, and to those peoples who join it. It is easy to anticipate that it would have magnified effects in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, if the triumphant Trump agenda and the hawks were fulfilled for these three countries.
But Lawfare also has another face, that of impunity. Corruption, drug trafficking, organized crime, are blessed by Washington, provided that the regimes that the perpetrator regimes are unconditional. It is not surprising that all those who overthrew Dilma Roussef are involved in major crimes, or that they imprison Lula for the term necessary to get him out of the presidential race. More recently, the Coup d'etat in Bolivia, where an unknown by force is imposed, and is pursued without charge to the constitutional president, under the protective shadow of the United States, demonstrates that the "rule of law" is transformed in the "empire of violence" whenever the system so decides.
Zelaya knows Lawfare firsthand. Since its return to Honduras, under the Cartagena Agreement, the coup regime, now led by Juan Orlando Hernández, has been engaged in a witch hunt, against his and close collaborators his government, who have not been able to culminate at the stake for lack of rational indications that their accusations have any basis. Even so, the former Honduran president, lives every day, a systematic lynching in the media, of which both the regime, as well as overlapping groups, with a left-wing façade participate, under the auspices of NGOs, which reach George Soros .
The former president has been sentenced only to pay the State of Honduras (of the coup plotters) the reimbursement of the amount paid for compensation to an employee (then Minister of Micheletti) that Zelaya dismissed during his administration, for his alignment with the IMF, against The interests of the Honduran people. For that reason, his residence is under precautionary embargo. Meanwhile, the harassment has been extended to several of its officials, who have been investigated to the source of personal items.
In Honduras, the Lawfare became a thousand-headed monster, which produced, in the name of the rule of law, two separate electoral frauds, and the death of dozens of people for expressing their political disagreements in protests against the regime. No one is tried for this, although the young student Rommel Valdemar Herrera is facing a sentence of more than 15 years in prison, requested by the United States, for his alleged participation in the burning of tires at the entrance of the American Embassy in Tegucigalpa, the previous year.
Actually, the issue of prevailing laws raises a fundamental issue. The bourgeois state apparatus has a fundamentally repressive character, and is aimed at submitting the majorities. It is in itself a body of quasi-religious characteristics, which have nothing to do with the rights or freedoms of people. Any liberal theory about it has been overwhelmed by the reality of elites as a reactionary class, which punishes what does not favor it.
And since the class interests that define the reactionary position of the Latin American ruling classes have an essentially economic nature, it is necessary to understand that, although the electoral processes serve us to reach the governmental direction, it is necessary to change the system, as well as the laws that sustain; It is imperative to rescue the preeminence of the human being as a fundamental objective of all social activity.
Zelaya's intervention in Brussels has been very timely, where he has raised a problem that requires collective attention. It is perhaps necessary to think that the peoples of our America must seek a minimum consensus on the structural changes that today press everyone.
To see Manuel Zelaya's participation, go to the following link:
Canadian regimes!Do the bells ring? Westminster child sex abuse: Senior police
and politicians knew about widespread paedophilia but ‘turned a blind
eye to it’, inquiry finds
Former prime minister Margaret Thatcher was aware of rumours about Tory MP ‘but did nothing’, probe claims
Senior political and police figures knew about child sexual abuse linked to Westminster but “turned a blind eye to it” amid a culture of cover up, an inquiry has found.
Political institutions significantly failed in their responses to
allegations of child sex abuse for decades by “actively shielding and
protecting perpetrators” and covering up allegations, the Independent
Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse has concluded.
According to the
inquiry, several highly placed people in the 1970s and 1980s, including
Sir Peter Morrison MP and Sir Cyril Smith MP, were known or rumoured to
be active in their sexual interest in children and were protected from
prosecution in a number of ways, including by police.
Former
Metropolitan Police officer Robert Glen told the inquiry his team had
enough evidence to prosecute Sir Cyril Smith, a former Liberal MP, in
the 1970s for sexual offences against young boys – but he claims the
investigation was thwarted by senior officers who claimed it was “too
political”.
The report also
claims Liberal Party members “were likely to be aware of allegations
against Smith” but “did nothing to inhibit his political progress”.
The party leader at the time, Lord David Steel, allegedly admitted to
the inquiry that he “assumed” Smith had committed the offences alleged
in a Private Eye article but took no actions as it happened “before he was even a member of my party”.
In the late 1980s, allegations arose that Sir Peter Morrison, the
Conservative MP for Chester, had been caught by police molesting a
15-year-old boy on a train at Crewe.
The report claims senior officials within the Conservative Party
knew about allegations concerning Morrison for years but did not pass
them on to police.
Instead, he became Margaret Thatcher’s Parliamentary Private Secretary in 1990 and was knighted a year later.
Thatcher was aware of rumours about Morrison but did nothing, Lord Armstrong claimed.
'There Might Have Been' Westminster Child Abuse Cover-Up
Westminster child sex abuse: Senior police
and politicians knew about widespread paedophilia but ‘turned a blind
eye to it’, inquiry finds
A vivid picture of corruption in central London in the 1960s, 1970s
and 1980s was portrayed by several witnesses, the inquiry report said.
“This included the cruising of expensive cars around Piccadilly
Circus, by those viewing boys and young men, who would hang around the
railings known as the ‘meat rack’ to be picked up by older men and
abused,” it added.
The boys were described as being aged between 11 and 22 and from “damaged backgrounds” or “runaways from the care system”.
Lord Taverne, a Home Office minister in 1966, described a meeting
with the then home secretary, Roy Jenkins, and the then commissioner of
the Metropolitan Police, Sir Joe Simpson, during which Sir Joe remarked
that there were “several ‘cottages’ in Westminster which we don’t
investigate” because “they are frequented by celebrities and MPs”, the
report said.
While not specifically about the sexual abuse of children, the
inquiry said: “It is an example of a policy giving special treatment to
persons of prominence and of deference towards those in power at
Westminster.”
During three weeks of public hearings last year, the inquiry
heard from survivors, whistleblowers, cabinet ministers, MPs and police
officers, among others.
The inquiry did not find any evidence of an organised paedophile network at the heart of government.
However, the report concluded that there has been a political
culture which values its reputation far higher than the fate of the
children involved.
It has made five recommendations, including ensuring all
political parties have comprehensive safeguarding policies and
procedures.
The inquiry is also calling on the Cabinet Office to re-examine its policy on the posthumous forfeiture of honours.
Professor Alexis Jay OBE, chair of the inquiry, said: “It is
clear to see that Westminster institutions have repeatedly failed to
deal with allegations of child sexual abuse, from turning a blind eye to
actively shielding abusers.
“A consistent pattern emerged of failures to put the welfare of
children above political status although we found no evidence of an
organised network of paedophiles within government.
“We hope this report and its recommendations will lead political
institutions to prioritise the needs and safety of vulnerable children.
How do you convince a child who has been routinely handcuffed, shackled, tied down, locked up, and immobilized by government officials—all before he reaches the age of adulthood—that he has any rights at all, let alone the right to challenge wrongdoing, resist oppression and defend himself against injustice?
Most of all, how do you persuade a fellow American that the government works for him when, for most of his young life, he has been incarcerated in an institution that teaches young people to be obedient and compliant citizens who don’t talk back, don’t question and don’t challenge authority?
Peter Gray, a professor of psychology at Boston College, believes that school is a prison that is damaging our kids, and it’s hard to disagree, especially with the numbers of police officers being assigned to schools on the rise.
Students, in turn, are not only finding themselves subjected to police tactics such as handcuffs, leg shackles, tasers and excessive force for “acting up” but are also being ticketed, fined and sent to court for behavior perceived as defiant, disruptive or disorderly such as spraying perfume and writing on a desk.
Clearly, the pathology that characterizes the American police state has passed down to the schools.
Now in addition to the government and its agents viewing the citizenry as suspects to be probed, poked, pinched, tasered, searched, seized, stripped and generally manhandled, all with the general blessing of the courts, our children in the public schools are also fair game for school resource officers who taser teenagers and handcuff kindergartners, school officials who have criminalized childhood behavior, school lockdowns and terror drills that teach your children to fear and comply, and a police state mindset that has transformed the schools into quasi-prisons.
Don’t even get me started on the “school-to-prison pipeline,” the phenomenon in which children who are suspended or expelled from school have a greater likelihood of ending up in jail. One study found that “being suspended or expelled made a student nearly three times more likely to come into contact with the juvenile justice system within the next year.”
By the time the average young person in America finishes their public school education, nearly one out of every three of them will have been arrested. Nearly 40 percent of those young people who are arrested will serve time in a private prison, where the emphasis is on making profits for large megacorporations above all else.
Indeed, this profit-driven system of incarceration has also given rise to a growth in juvenile prisons and financial incentives for jailing young people. In this way, young people have become easy targets for the private prison industry, which profits from criminalizing childish behavior and jailing young people.
None of these tactics are making our communities or schools any safer, and they’re certainly not contributing to environments in which learning flourishes. Incredibly, despite the fact that the U.S. invests more money in public education (roughly $13,000 per child per year) than many other developed countries, we rank around the middle of the pack in science, math and reading, and behind many other advanced industrial nations.
Without a doubt, change is needed, but that will mean taking on the teachers’ unions, the school unions, the educators’ associations, and the police unions, not to mention the politicians dependent on their votes and all of the corporations that profit mightily from an industrial school complex.
As we’ve seen with other issues, any significant reforms will have to start locally and trickle upwards.
For starters, parents need to be vocal, visible and organized and demand that school officials 1) adopt a policy of positive reinforcement in dealing with behavior issues; 2) minimize the presence in the schools of police officers and cease involving them in student discipline; and 3) insist that all behavioral issues be addressed first and foremost with a child’s parents, before any other disciplinary tactics are attempted.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if you want a nation of criminals, treat the citizenry like criminals.
If you want young people who grow up seeing themselves as prisoners, run the schools like prisons.
If, on the other hand, you want to raise up a generation of freedom fighters, who will actually operate with justice, fairness, accountability and equality towards each other and their government, then run the schools like freedom forums.
Remove the metal detectors and surveillance cameras, re-assign the cops elsewhere, and start treating our nation’s young people like citizens of a republic and not inmates in a police state penitentiary.
US report: Minorities are targets of police brutality in schools“Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning.”—Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes
Just when you thought the government couldn’t get any more tone-deaf about civil liberties and the growing need to protect “we the people” against an overreaching, overbearing police state, the Trump Administration ushers in even more strident zero tolerance policies that treat children like suspects and criminals, greater numbers of school cops, and all the trappings of a prison complex (unsurmountable fences, entrapment areas, no windows or trees, etc.).
The fallout has been what you’d expect, with the nation’s young people treated like hardened criminals: handcuffed, arrested, tasered, tackled and taught the painful lesson that the Constitution (especially the Fourth Amendment) doesn’t mean much in the American police state.
For example, in Florida, a cop assigned to River Ridge High School as a school resource officer, threatened to shoot a student attempting to leave school for a morning orthodontist appointment.
In Pennsylvania, school officials called in the cops after a 6-year-old with Down syndrome pointed a finger gun at her teacher.
In Kentucky, a school resource officer with the sheriff’s office handcuffed two elementary school children with disabilities, ages 8 and 9. A federal judge made the sheriff’s office pay more than $300,000 (of taxpayer money) to the families, ruling that the handcuffing of the students “was an unconstitutional seizure and excessive force.”
MORE...
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Gaza Talent Malak Mattar Robbed of Travel and University Dreams: An Attack On Gaza’s Education
Dr. Wayne Ross: The Fear Created by Precarious Existence in The Neoliberal World Discourages Critical Thinking
Moving Forward, Not Back, on Education
Welcome to Compliance 101: the police state’s primer in how to churn out compliant citizens and transform the nation’s school’s into quasi-prisons through the use of surveillance cameras, metal detectors, police patrols, zero tolerance policies, lock downs, drug sniffing dogs, strip searches and active shooter drills.
If you were wondering, these police state tactics have not made the schools any safer.
Rather, they’ve turned the schools into authoritarian microcosms of the police state, containing almost every aspect of the militarized, intolerant, senseless, overcriminalized, legalistic, surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape that plagues those of us on the “outside.”
Two years after President Trump announced his intention to “harden” the schools, our nation’s children are reaping the ill effects of gun-toting, taser-wielding cops in government-run schools that bear an uncomfortable resemblance to prisons.
America’s schools are about as authoritarian as they come.
From the moment a child enters one of the nation’s 98,000 public schools to the moment he or she graduates, they will be exposed to a steady diet of:
draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior,
overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech,
school resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining and/or arresting so-called “disorderly” students,
standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking,
politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those around them,
and extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled with the rest, acclimate young people to a world in which they have no freedom of thought, speech or movement.
Young people in America are now first in line to be searched, surveilled, spied on, threatened, tied up, locked down, treated like criminals for non-criminal behavior, tasered and in some cases shot.
In my day, if you talked back to a teacher, or played a prank on a classmate, or just failed to do your homework, you might find yourself in detention or doing an extra writing assignment after school.
That is no longer the case.
Nowadays, students are not only punished for minor transgressions such as playing cops and robbers on the playground, bringing LEGOs to school, or having a food fight, but the punishments have become far more severe, shifting from detention and visits to the principal’s office into misdemeanor tickets, juvenile court, handcuffs, tasers and even prison terms.
Students have been suspended under school zero tolerance policies for bringing to school “look alike substances” such as oregano, breath mints, birth control pills and powdered sugar.
US Schools-Sponsored Violence Against Children by the Police
Look-alike weapons (toy guns—even Lego-sized ones, hand-drawn pictures of guns, pencils twirled in a “threatening” manner, imaginary bows and arrows, even fingers positioned like guns) can also land a student in hot water.
Even good deeds do not go unpunished.
One 13-year-old was given detention for exposing the school to “liability” by sharing his lunch with a hungry friend. A third grader was suspended for shaving her head in sympathy for a friend who had lost her hair to chemotherapy. And then there was the high school senior who was suspended for saying “bless you” after a fellow classmate sneezed.
In South Carolina, where it’s against the law to disturb a school, more than a thousand students a year—some as young as 7 years old—“face criminal charges for not following directions, loitering, cursing, or the vague allegation of acting ‘obnoxiously.’ If charged as adults, they can be held in jail for up to 90 days.”
These outrageous incidents are exactly what you’ll see more of if the Trump Administration gets its way.
Increasing the number of cops in the schools only adds to the problem.
Thanks to a combination of media hype, political pandering and financial incentives, the use of armed police officers (a.k.a. school resource officers) to patrol school hallways has risen dramatically in the years since the Columbine school shooting.
Indeed, the growing presence of police in the nation’s schools is resulting in greater police “involvement in routine discipline matters that principals and parents used to address without involvement from law enforcement officers.”
Funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, these school resource officers (SRO) have become de facto wardens in elementary, middle and high schools, doling out their own brand of justice to the so-called “criminals” in their midst with the help of tasers, pepper spray, batons and brute force.
In the absence of school-appropriate guidelines, police are more and more “stepping in to deal with minor rulebreaking: sagging pants, disrespectful comments, brief physical skirmishes. What previously might have resulted in a detention or a visit to the principal’s office was replaced with excruciating pain and temporary blindness, often followed by a trip to the courthouse.”
The horror stories are legion.
One SRO was accused of punching a 13-year-old student in the face for cutting the cafeteria line.
That same cop put another student in a chokehold a week later, allegedly knocking the student unconscious and causing a brain injury.
In Pennsylvania, a student was tasered after ignoring an order to put his cell phone away.
When 13-year-old Kevens Jean Baptiste failed to follow a school bus driver’s direction to keep the bus windows closed (Kevens, who suffers from asthma, opened the window after a fellow student sprayed perfume, causing him to cough and wheeze), he was handcuffed by police, removed from the bus, and while still handcuffed, had his legs swept out from under him by an officer, causing him to crash to the ground.
Young Alex Stone didn’t even make it past the first week of school before he became a victim of the police state. Directed by his teacher to do a creative writing assignment involving a series of fictional Facebook statuses, Stone wrote, “I killed my neighbor's pet dinosaur. I bought the gun to take care of the business.” Despite the fact that dinosaurs are extinct, the status fabricated, and the South Carolina student was merely following orders, his teacher reported him to school administrators, who in turn called the police.
What followed is par for the course in schools today: students were locked down in their classrooms while armed police searched the 16-year-old’s locker and bookbag, handcuffed him, charged him with disorderly conduct disturbing the school, arrested him, detained him, and then he was suspended from school.
Not even the younger, elementary school-aged kids are being spared these “hardening” tactics.
On any given day when school is in session, kids who “act up” in class are pinned facedown on the floor, locked in dark closets, tied up with straps, bungee cords and duct tape, handcuffed, leg shackled, tasered or otherwise restrained, immobilized or placed in solitary confinement in order to bring them under “control.”
In almost every case, these undeniably harsh methods are used to punish kids—some as young as 4 and 5 years old—for simply failing to follow directions or throwing tantrums.
Very rarely do the kids pose any credible danger to themselves or others.
Unbelievably, these tactics are all legal, at least when employed by school officials or school resource officers in the nation’s public schools.
This is what happens when you introduce police and police tactics into the schools.
Paradoxically, by the time you add in the lockdowns and active shooter drills, instead of making the schools safer, school officials have succeeded in creating an environment in which children are so traumatized that they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, nightmares, anxiety, mistrust of adults in authority, as well as feelings of anger, depression, humiliation, despair and delusion.
For example, a middle school in Washington State went on lockdown after a student brought a toy gun to class. A Boston high school went into lockdown for four hours after a bullet was discovered in a classroom. A North Carolina elementary school locked down and called in police after a fifth grader reported seeing an unfamiliar man in the school (it turned out to be a parent).
Police officers at a Florida middle school carried out an active shooter drill in an effort to educate students about how to respond in the event of an actual shooting crisis. Two armed officers, guns loaded and drawn, burst into classrooms, terrorizing the students and placing the school into lockdown mode.
If these exercises are intended to instill fear and compliance into young people, they’re working.
As journalist Dahlia Lithwick points out: “I don’t recall any serious national public dialogue about lockdown protocols or how they became the norm. It seems simply to have begun, modeling itself on the lockdowns that occur during prison riots, and then spread until school lockdowns and lockdown drills are as common for our children as fire drills, and as routine as duck-and-cover drills were in the 1950s.”
The toll such incidents take on adults can be life-altering, but when such police brutality is perpetrated on young people, the end result is nothing less than complete indoctrination into becoming compliant citizens of a totalitarian state.
Schools acting like prisons.
School officials acting like wardens.
Students treated like inmates and punished like hardened criminals.
This is the end product of all those so-called school “safety” policies, which run the gamut from zero tolerance policies that punish all infractions harshly to surveillance cameras, metal detectors, random searches, drug-sniffing dogs, school-wide lockdowns, active-shooter drills and militarized police officers.
Unfortunately, advocates for such harsh police tactics and weaponry like to trot out the line that school safety should be our first priority lest we find ourselves with another Sandy Hook.
What they will not tell you is that such shootings are rare.
As one congressional report found, the schools are, generally speaking, safe places for children.
In their zeal to crack down on guns and lock down the schools, these cheerleaders for police state tactics in the schools might also fail to mention the lucrative, multi-million dollar deals being cut with military contractors such as Taser International to equip these school cops with tasers, tanks, rifles and $100,000 shooting detection systems.
Indeed, the transformation of hometown police departments into extensions of the military has been mirrored in the public schools, where school police have been gifted with high-powered M16 rifles, MRAP armored vehicles, grenade launchers, and other military gear. One Texas school district even boasts its own 12-member SWAT team.
According to one law review article on the school-to-prison pipeline, “Many school districts have formed their own police departments, some so large they rival the forces of major United States cities in size. For example, the safety division in New York City’s public schools is so large that if it were a local police department, it would be the fifth-largest police force in the country.”
The ramifications are far-reaching.
There can be no avoiding the hands-on lessons being taught in the schools about the role of police in our lives, ranging from active shooter drills and school-wide lockdowns to incidents in which children engaging in typically childlike behavior are suspended (for shooting an imaginary “arrow” at a fellow classmate), handcuffed (for being disruptive at school), arrested (for throwing water balloons as part of a school prank), and even tasered (for not obeying instructions).
Instead of raising up a generation of freedom fighters—which one would hope would be the objective of the schools—government officials seem determined to churn out newly minted citizens of the American police state who are being taught the hard way what it means to comply, fear and march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.
So what’s the answer, not only for the here-and-now—the children growing up in these quasi-prisons—but for the future of this country?
Why are police inside public schools?
How do you convince a child who has been routinely handcuffed, shackled, tied down, locked up, and immobilized by government officials—all before he reaches the age of adulthood—that he has any rights at all, let alone the right to challenge wrongdoing, resist oppression and defend himself against injustice?
Most of all, how do you persuade a fellow American that the government works for him when, for most of his young life, he has been incarcerated in an institution that teaches young people to be obedient and compliant citizens who don’t talk back, don’t question and don’t challenge authority?
Peter Gray, a professor of psychology at Boston College, believes that school is a prison that is damaging our kids, and it’s hard to disagree, especially with the numbers of police officers being assigned to schools on the rise.
Students, in turn, are not only finding themselves subjected to police tactics such as handcuffs, leg shackles, tasers and excessive force for “acting up” but are also being ticketed, fined and sent to court for behavior perceived as defiant, disruptive or disorderly such as spraying perfume and writing on a desk.
Clearly, the pathology that characterizes the American police state has passed down to the schools.
Now in addition to the government and its agents viewing the citizenry as suspects to be probed, poked, pinched, tasered, searched, seized, stripped and generally manhandled, all with the general blessing of the courts, our children in the public schools are also fair game for school resource officers who taser teenagers and handcuff kindergartners, school officials who have criminalized childhood behavior, school lockdowns and terror drills that teach your children to fear and comply, and a police state mindset that has transformed the schools into quasi-prisons.
Don’t even get me started on the “school-to-prison pipeline,” the phenomenon in which children who are suspended or expelled from school have a greater likelihood of ending up in jail. One study found that “being suspended or expelled made a student nearly three times more likely to come into contact with the juvenile justice system within the next year.”
By the time the average young person in America finishes their public school education, nearly one out of every three of them will have been arrested. Nearly 40 percent of those young people who are arrested will serve time in a private prison, where the emphasis is on making profits for large megacorporations above all else.
Indeed, this profit-driven system of incarceration has also given rise to a growth in juvenile prisons and financial incentives for jailing young people. In this way, young people have become easy targets for the private prison industry, which profits from criminalizing childish behavior and jailing young people.
None of these tactics are making our communities or schools any safer, and they’re certainly not contributing to environments in which learning flourishes. Incredibly, despite the fact that the U.S. invests more money in public education (roughly $13,000 per child per year) than many other developed countries, we rank around the middle of the pack in science, math and reading, and behind many other advanced industrial nations.
Without a doubt, change is needed, but that will mean taking on the teachers’ unions, the school unions, the educators’ associations, and the police unions, not to mention the politicians dependent on their votes and all of the corporations that profit mightily from an industrial school complex.
As we’ve seen with other issues, any significant reforms will have to start locally and trickle upwards.
For starters, parents need to be vocal, visible and organized and demand that school officials 1) adopt a policy of positive reinforcement in dealing with behavior issues; 2) minimize the presence in the schools of police officers and cease involving them in student discipline; and 3) insist that all behavioral issues be addressed first and foremost with a child’s parents, before any other disciplinary tactics are attempted.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if you want a nation of criminals, treat the citizenry like criminals.
If you want young people who grow up seeing themselves as prisoners, run the schools like prisons.
If, on the other hand, you want to raise up a generation of freedom fighters, who will actually operate with justice, fairness, accountability and equality towards each other and their government, then run the schools like freedom forums.
Remove the metal detectors and surveillance cameras, re-assign the cops elsewhere, and start treating our nation’s young people like citizens of a republic and not inmates in a police state penitentiary.
Media Blackout of Embassy Protection Collective 4 Trial Kept Venezuela’s Truth ‘In the Dark’ The trial of four Embassy Protection Collective members, who defended the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, DC, in May 2019 from seizure by the Venezuelan opposition supporting the US-backed coup attempt against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, ended with a deadlocked jury Friday.
However, even if the charges against the Embassy Protection Collective members are dropped, there is a need to disseminate truthful information on Venezuela and other examples of US interventionist policies to a broader audience, David Paul, one of the four Collective members who faced trial, told Radio Sputnik Tuesday.
“It’s not over yet. But the important part of it ended. It gave us a lot of information about where we stand and what we face,” Paul told Loud & Clear Host John Kiriakou.
“In a general sense, the whole trial is sort of an unreal fantasy event, because we go into the trial … we swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but … in fact, there’s a lot of truth we can’t say. There’s so much we can’t say, and our whole point of being in the embassy was to try to tell the truth, to give voice to the truth about what is going on in Venezuela, to counter the massive disinformation that the mainstream media has shown to [viewers] for many years,” Paul explained. The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortunately, man must reside in the universe. - R. Zelazny “It’s a challenge to try to say as much as we can without stepping on the rules that the judge and the court laid out to limit giving a context to why we were in the embassy, and that’s a challenge if we get retried. We did see through this first trial what the government’s arguments to the jury are, and they saw ours. So, if there is another trial, we might have to make some adjustments,” he noted.
“For example, we were told we cannot say that Nicolás Maduro is the elected president of Venezuela - we can only say we have a subjective belief that the Maduro government gave us permission to be in the embassy,” Paul pointed out. According to the US government, the Maduro government is illegitimate and the Washington, DC, embassy should be under the authority of envoys representing Juan Guaido, whose claim on Maduro’s office is backed by the Trump administration.
The 37-day defense of the Venezeulan Embassy by the Embassy Protection Collective started on April 10 and ended on May 16, when US Secret Service agents forced their way into the building in a SWAT-style raid and arrested the four remaining activists: Paul, along with Kevin Zeese, Adrienne Pine and Margaret Flowers. They were subsequently charged with interfering with certain federal protective functions.
On Friday, the jury declared that they were deadlocked, and District of Columbia District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled a mistrial.
“They [the prosecution] are going to talk to their superiors in the State Department and see how they want to move forward. On February 28, the two sides come together in court, and the government will tell us if they want to go forward with another trial or [if] they [want to] drop the charges. It’s one of those two choices, and we have nothing to do with it at this point. And once we hear from them on the 28th, we will know what we are facing,” Paul explained.
During the Embassy Protection Collective’s defense of the Venezuelan Embassy, their supporters were frequently assaulted by right-wing opponents of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).
“It was quite a scene with this quite loud and violent mob surrounding the embassy, assaulting our supporters, blocking food … there’s so much disinformation that the surrounding community didn’t know what was going on and saw it as an irritation … I was still frustrated … how little news about this was in the general population. I even have many libreral/progressive friends … who didn’t even know anything about it, even after we were arrested,” Paul said. “We have to go beyond the sort of, this small circle of progressive supporters to get to the general population so that when a jury comes in - not just in our case, any case - they aren’t in the dark,” he argued.
“We need to be able to convert our beliefs, our political beliefs into words that aren’t such buzzwords that turn people off … I also think, right from the beginning, in any kind of action or event, have more information that is readily available like flyers or pamphlets, right from the beginning, that people can see on the streets instead of banners and chants … and more press conferences and more [activism and information dissemination] on social media,” Paul added.
Shut Down Canada Until It Solves Its War, Oil, and Genocide Problem
Indigenous
people in Canada are giving the world a demonstration of the power of
nonviolent action. The justness of their cause — defending the land from
those who would destroy it for short term profit and the elimination of
a habitable climate on earth — combined with their courage and the
absence on their part of cruelty or hatred, has the potential to create a
much larger movement, which is of course the key to success.
This
is a demonstration of nothing less than a superior alternative to war,
not just because the war weapons of the militarized Canadian police may
be defeated by the resistance of the people who have never been
conquered or surrendered, but also because the Canadian government could
accomplish its aims in the wider world better by following a similar
path, by abandoning the use of war for supposedly humanitarian ends and
making use of humanitarian means instead. Nonviolence is simply more
likely to succeed in domestic and international relations than violence.
War is not a tool for preventing but for facilitating its identical
twin, genocide.
Of course, the indigenous people in “British
Columbia,” as around the world, are demonstrating something else as
well, for those who care to see it: a way of living sustainably on
earth, an alternative to earth-violence, to the raping and murdering of
the planet — an activity closely linked to the use of violence against
human beings.
The Canadian government, like its southern
neighbor, has an unacknowledged addiction to the war-oil-genocide
problem. When Donald Trump says he needs troops in Syria to steal oil,
or John Bolton says Venezuela needs a coup to steal oil, it’s simply an
acknowledgement of the global continuation of the never-ended operation
of stealing North America.
Canada's Dark Secret | Featured Documentaries Look at the gas-fracking invasion of unspoiled lands in Canada, or the wall on the Mexican border, or the occupation of Palestine, or the destruction of Yemen, or the “longest ever” war on Afghanistan (which is only the longest ever because the primary victims of North American militarism are still not considered real people with real nations whose destruction counts as real wars) , and what do you see? You see the same weapons, the same tools, the same senseless destruction and cruelty, and the same massive profits flowing into the same pockets of the same profiteers from blood and suffering — the corporations that will be shamelessly marketing their products at the CANSEC weapons show in Ottawa in May.
Much of the profits these days comes from distant wars fought in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, but those wars drive the technology and the contracts and the experience of war veterans that militarize the police in places like North America. The same wars (always fought for “freedom,” of course) also influence the culture toward greater acceptance of the violation of basic rights in the name of “national security” and other meaningless phrases. This process is exacerbated by the blurring of the line between war and police, as wars become endless occupations, missiles become tools of random isolated murder, and activists — antiwar activists, antipipeline activists, antigenocide activists — become categorized with terrorists and enemies.
Not only is war over 100 times more likely where there is oil or gas (and in no way more likely where there is terrorism or human rights violations or resource scarcity or any of the things people like to tell themselves cause wars) but war and war preparations are leading consumers of oil and gas. Not only is violence needed to steal the gas from indigenous lands, but that gas is highly likely to be put to use in the commission of wider violence, while in addition helping to render the earth’s climate unfit for human life. While peace and environmentalism are generally treated as separable, and militarism is left out of environmental treaties and environmental conversations, war is in fact a leading environmental destroyer. Guess who just pushed a bill through the U.S. Congress to allow both weapons and pipelines into Cyprus? Exxon-Mobil.
Solidarity of the longest victims of western imperialism with the newest ones is a source of great potential for justice in the world.
But I mentioned the war-oil-genocide problem. What does any of this have to do with genocide? Well, genocide is an act “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” Such an act can involve murder or kidnapping or both or neither. Such an act can “physically” harm no one. It can be any one, or more than one, of these five things:
(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated
to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Human Rights Watch: Canadian Police Raped & Abused Aboriginal Women
Numerous top Canadian officials over the years have stated clearly that the intention of Canada’s child-removal program was to eliminated Indigenous cultures, to utterly remove “the Indian problem.” Proving the crime of genocide does not require the statement of intent, but in this case, as in Nazi Germany, as in today’s Palestine, and as in most if not all cases, there is no shortage of expressions of genocidal intent. Still, what matters legally is genocidal results, and that is what one can expect from stealing people’s land to frack it, to poison it, to render it uninhabitable.
When the treaty to ban genocide was being drafted in 1947, at the same time that Nazis were still being put on trial, and while U.S. government scientists were experimenting on Guatemalans with syphilis, Canadian government “educators” were performing “nutritional experiments” on Indigenous children — that is to say: starving them to death. The original draft of the new law included the crime of cultural genocide. While this was stripped out at the urging of Canada and the United States, it remained in the form of item “e” above. Canada ratified the treaty nonetheless, and despite having threatened to add reservations to its ratification, did no such thing. But Canada enacted into its domestic law only items “a” and “c” — simply omitting “b,” “d,” and “e” in the list above, despite the legal obligation to include them. Even the United States has included what Canada omitted.
Canada should be shut down (as should the United States) until it recognizes that it has a problem and begins to mend its ways. And even if Canada didn’t need to be shut down, CANSEC would need to be shut down.
CANSEC is one of the largest annual weapons shows in North America. Here’s how it describes itself, a list of exhibitors, and a list of the members of the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries which hosts CANSEC.
CANSEC facilitates Canada’s role as a major weapons dealer to the world, and the second biggest weapons exporter to the Middle East. So does ignorance. In the late 1980s opposition to a forerunner of CANSEC called ARMX created a great deal of media coverage. The result was a new public awareness, which led to a ban on weapons shows on city property in Ottawa, which lasted 20 years.
The gap left by media silence on Canadian weapons dealing is filled with misleading claims about Canada’s supposed role as a peacekeeper and participant in supposedly humanitarian wars, as well as the non-legal justification for wars known as “the responsibility to protect.”
In reality, Canada is a major marketer and seller of weapons and components of weapons, with two of its top customers being the United States and Saudi Arabia. The United States is the world’s leading marketer and seller of weapons, some of which weapons contain Canadian parts. CANSEC’s exhibitors include weapons companies from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.
There is little overlap between the wealthy weapons-dealing nations and the nations where wars are waged. U.S. weapons are often found on both sides of a war, rendering ridiculous any pro-war moral argument for those weapons sales.
CANSEC 2020’s website boasts that 44 local, national, and international media outlets will be attending a massive promotion of weapons of war. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Canada has been a party since 1976, states that “Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.”
The weapons exhibited at CANSEC are routinely used in violation of laws against war, such as the UN Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Pact — most frequently by Canada’s southern neighbor. CANSEC may also violate the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court by promoting acts of aggression. Here’s a report on Canadian exports to the United States of weapons used in the 2003-begun criminal war on Iraq. Here’s a report on Canada’s own use of weapons in that war.
The weapons exhibited at CANSEC are used not only in violation of laws against war but also in violation of numerous so-called laws of war, that is to say in the commission of particularly egregious atrocities, and in violation of the human rights of the victims of oppressive governments. Canada sells weapons to the brutal governments of Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.
Canada may be in violation of the Rome Statute as a result of supplying weapons that are used in violation of that Statute. It is certainly in violation of the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty. Canadian weapons are being used in the Saudi-U.S. genocide in Yemen.
The Hidden Scandal Of Canada's Missing Women
In 2015, Pope Francis remarked before a joint session of the United States Congress, “Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society? Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood. In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade.”
An international coalition of individuals and organizations will be converging on Ottawa in May to say No to CANSEC with a seris of events called NoWar2020.
This month two nations, Iraq and the Philippines, have told the United States military to get out. This happens more often than you might think. These actions are part of the same movement that tells the Canadian militarized police to get out of lands they have no rights in. All actions in this movement can inspire and inform all others
.After all the damage that we face.... After all those year's that we waste... Do you think you'll find a place to hide?
x Maciek Wisniewski: Wherever - in the context of global war from above to migrants or the global anti-neoliberal revolt from below - the world is full of repressed bodies
Is it a coincidence that Israeli soldiers shoot Palestinian protesters in Gaza's legs - descendants of refugees, victims of ethnic cleansing, expelled during the Nakba, today prisoners in the world's largest open-air prison - than in Is the context of the Great March of Return intended to return (symbolically) to their homes, denouncing the inhuman conditions of the Israeli blockade and the periodic punitive incursions? Almost 300 gazatíes have been killed - a true massacre - and 30 thousand were injured, many by live bullets, rubber-coated steel bullets or tear gas containers, especially in the legs, also with the prohibited fragmentation ammunition: more of 120 protesters had to suffer a subsequent amputation.
Is it a coincidence that Chilean police officers shoot the protesters who rebel against the balance of the neo-liberal model - rising cost of living, low wages, pensions, ultraprivatized health and education, etc. - a system that has them precarious and indebted, who - after a dose of sedatives and painkillers (bit.ly/2RgQSc9) - finally wake up and open eyes to injustices? Almost three thousand people were injured - and there were about 30 dead - in a brutal and totally disproportionate government response to the social outbreak very much in tune with the best traditions of the Pinochet dictatorship, including more than 400 who lost an eye on shots on purpose. face with pellets and rubber bullets with metal center (bit.ly/2Nyv21t), some even both (bit.ly/3ajNKUj). No. It is no accident. CHILE LOSE THE EYES IN PROTESTS As the body tends to occupy the center of politics - a step from political economy to biopolitics that we have not yet reflected enough (bit.ly/2ujlW2j) -, and the growing politicity manifests itself more and more in it, control and repression focus more and more on containing it - the process marked in turn by the rise of necropolitics (A. Mbembe, Necropolitics, 2019) and securocratism (J. Halper, War against the people, 2015 ) - pointing also to its specific and symptomatic parts: legs to walk / eyes to see.
Everywhere - in the context of global war from above to migrants or the global anti-neoliberal revolt from below - the world is full of repressed, wounded, detained, fenced, beaten, beaten, gassed, mutilated, broken, run over bodies, massacred, raped, imprisoned, missing, dead.
Perhaps never as now, mutilation is seen as an official and legitimate tool of public control and state policy (bit.ly/35JsPGU). Perhaps never as now the torture of a particular body is so much the torture of the social body as a whole and has never been so globalized (Latin American generals of the Condor Plan have been early precursors of this transnationalization as well).
According to the Chilean Ophthalmology Society, the number of wounded with eye injuries is totally unusual for the history of the country and the world and if it resembles something, it is what happens in Palestine (bit.ly/35VQpAd); But while there - according to a 1990-2017 study by the medical journal BMJ Open - 300 eye injuries have been reported from rubber bullets, in Chile only in three weeks we had more of these than in three decades of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As A. Mbembe emphasizes, the Israeli occupation of Palestine is a great laboratory of repression, control, surveillance and separation techniques. Even a paradigm of what is coming for our planet, already governed by a containment architecture of which Gaza is a model: an imprisoned territory, subject to periodic military incursions and mass murders, where a peculiar and particular form of biopolitical control consists of abdicate responsibility for the fate of those incarcerated, something “that becomes central to our times and is already integrated into our 'democracies'”. Palestinian protesters are being shot in their legs by Israeli soldiers
What we see in the Chilean streets where the protesters, who, despite the fact that they may lose an eye, - just like the Palestinians who demonstrate despite the fact that they can lose a leg - leave the embodied fear in the bodies left by the military dictatorship (The clash with which the Chilean model was implanted by Pinochet) against the forces of order that, in their eyes, are true foreign occupation forces that consider their enemy citizenship (bit.ly/3bbf87k), is equally paradigmatic.
On the one hand, given the history and present of military cooperation between Israel and Chile (https://lahaine.org/cS3f), it is a creative - more violent / more brutal - realization of the exported Gaza model (“the‘ export
Coronavirus, technoscience and power x Alfredo Caro Maldonado: Why do we care so much as societies about relatively low-lethal epidemics, while we ignore the stroke by city pollution
One of the characteristics of contemporary times is that what is written ages instantly. At the time of writing, some tens of thousands of people with coronavirus infection and hundreds of deaths have been diagnosed, but according to The Lancet, one hundred thousand infected people could have been exceeded. But they are old figures, and how could it be otherwise, here you can follow the numbers in real time. This is the news of the beginning of the decade, no doubt. A lot is being published on the subject, but everything is confusing and having clear that all prudence is little, we just wanted to summarize what is known, disassemble bulos and launch some ideas for debate.
What is coronavirus (CV)?
At this point the population has become an expert in virology. We have seen the last few weeks the image of the crown of the Wuhan virus. It is one of the viruses that produces the common cold, along with the rhinovirus, that affects the respiratory tract and can cause pneumonia. It is a virus called RNA, that means that its genetic information is contained in a molecule more elementary than DNA.
Where does this 2019-nCoV come from?
Viruses, to reproduce, need the machinery of the cells. They are very elementary biological particles that are at the limits of life. So to penetrate the cell, circumvent defense controls, integrate into the cell genome and use its machinery to produce new virions, adaptation to the host is needed. That is, not any virus can infect any organism.
And here are two false stories that circulate about it:
It is not a virus that has escaped from any Chinese bioterrorist research center. Hindu researchers analyzed the nucleotide sequence of the virus and discovered very small fragments of 18 nucleotides, which when translated into protein are 6 amino acids, which do not coincide with other coronaviruses. In addition, that sequence does coincide with other RNA viruses, for example that of HIV. This study has not yet been published passing the normal controls, but has used a relatively new tool in biomedicine, not in other disciplines, and that is giving good results, which is the "pre-print", a method of pre-printing publication that allows the scientific community to value a study. But it is important that society and especially the media are aware that this is not a scientific publication, because it has not passed the necessary controls. Although this does not mean that a scientific publication necessarily has to be reliable. So the community has scrutinized these results and has dismantled the weak conclusions of the authors. No, there are no indications of genetic engineering behind this sequence, but they are very common fragments, typical of the mutations necessary for species jumps.
Nor is it a foreign bioterrorist attack on China as conspiracy news states because Chinese and foreign scientists have quite limited origin.
And it doesn't come from a snake. The differences are too large, it is more likely to come from a mammal, a civet (such as a gine) or a pangolin that has jumped from the bat. But this does not mean that we have to kill all the bats, or even stop eating them, well, that perhaps, especially the poor unfortunate pangolin. Jumps of viruses between species are inevitable, but it is true that they can be faster (and therefore more lethal) the more we invade uninhabited areas, as could be the case with Ebola.
What is the real scope and danger?
It is said that the Chinese government is hiding the real figures. Even relevant medical figures such as Dr. Cavadas who is a surgeon, not an epidemiologist, in an interview with Antena 3 who went viral, where he states with a single fact, that his daughters are Chinese, that the figures are much higher, between ten hundred times. It is very irresponsible to affirm such barbarity. WHO has participated from the beginning, together with the Chinese government, in monitoring the epidemic. If this bocachancla doctor had half a reason there would be one million infected and twenty thousand dead. Impossible to hide.
The consequences of media paranoia is that in Frosinone, Italy, for example, they are taking it in stone with the Chinese community. All that technological progress, all that civilization, to return to the stoning of lepers.
The virus is spreading seems quite fast, a consequence of the universalization of transport (high-speed trains and airplanes) in China. In Spain it is estimated that fifteen thousand people died of influenza in the period of 2017-2018. The lethality of CV seems less than that of influenza and much less than malaria. But estimates of 2% mortality could be very biased by the fact that since the infection occurs until the person dies weeks go by, so today's mortality is that of those infected three weeks ago, but of the diagnosed two years ago. Again there are no reliable figures.
It can be spread before symptoms appear and sometimes go unnoticed, so the measures being taken, such as quarantining millions of people, closing borders or taking the temperature in public spaces, will not work.
There is another interesting aspect. It could be that the excessive increase in cases is due in part to the improvement in diagnosis, so, when more patients are detected, it contributes to appear that it is growing at a higher rate than it had been 20 years ago. That is, it is the great capacity for diagnosis (PCR and affordable sequencing) and mass control of body temperature, which precisely means that all those thousands of cases are being detected which 20 years ago would have gone through a simple cold. It is the Paradox of Jevons applied to an epidemic. The more technology, the more sick. However, the number of asymptomatic but undiagnosed infectives is unknown. It is China's great development, in turn, that has allowed such rapid expansion; and also what has allowed him to react in such a beast and possibly disproportionate manner. The reaction of the Chinese government is striking, building a hospital for a thousand people in a few days. A clear punch on the table, a message abroad demonstrating its technological power and another inside responding to a population that demands a strong state, capable of taking care of its people effectively. Although more technology does not necessarily mean more efficiency. And the height of the paradox is that the virus jeopardizes the success of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Prevention measures
These viruses are transmitted by aerosols (cough, sneezing) and by contact. It seems that in the first case only if it is less than two meters away. However, the Chinese authorities are even giving away masks. The mask does not protect at all unless it has a filter and is well adjusted. The paper ones, especially after a good handling, are useless. What it protects is obviously to avoid contact with affected people, to wash their hands well, hygiene of surfaces that many people touch, etc. But we must emphasize the prevention of transmission. Everyone has the responsibility to cough and sneeze into the elbow, use (really) disposable tissues. And the measure that would effectively prevent the spread of viruses like this, or the flu, is to stay home when you feel bad. As simple as that. The one that cannot take you out of the job for missing, that the care of sick people is recognized and some of the carers may be absent to take care, for example. That would be much more effective than many of the measures being carried out.
One of the most interesting measures that the Chinese government has implemented is to give more vacation days after the new year and many companies ask their employees to work from home. It is one of the most effective solutions. The main risk factor in the transmission of influenza (and therefore the CV) is Frenadol. Yes, that reactionary invention so that you work while ill and that, as in the announcement, you accompany your daughter to the costume party, both very irresponsible activities with a contagious disease. The case of the German tourist in La Gomera with CV turns out that he was infected from a person who had been in contact with a Chinese co-worker, and that is that the virus is transmitted before it produces symptoms. And it has an incubation period of 5 days. As it turns out, that German went to work "because he already felt better."
Treatments
Vaccinations
Vaccines are biological medicines that respond to a general principle called "adaptive immunity." That means that in front of a biological element, strange (external) potentially pathogenic, proteins called antibodies that specifically attack those pathogens are developed based on signals that make them unique. But of course, the work of the star cop is not easy, as we were taught marvelously in "Once upon a time life", rather complex, because differentiating that of the alien and the potentially pathogenic requires a series of controls to avoid rolling it brown (autoimmunity or sepsis)
which makes many diseases not have a "good" adaptive response, such as colds or the flu. It is not just a matter of virus mutations as they say, but of proportional responses. So sometimes the best defense against the virus is innate immunity, that the fever rises, we are tired and we stay in bed.
The vaccines are trying to imitate that natural process, so some work great and others do not work no matter how much the AEP try to sell them at all costs even in breach of the law.
The case of CV, such as colds (rhinovirus) or influenza, are examples of very complicated vaccines. In the best case it would take a couple of years to have a list to vaccinate massively. The pharmaceutical companies want to accelerate this process at all costs and that has some problems, no matter how much the Iker Jiménez of the solutionism says otherwise. For example, these vaccines against the CV of 2002, SARs, produced such an exaggerated immune response in mice that induced pneumonia.
Vaccines are not uniform, safe and always effective technological solutions, but have unpredictable consequences and variable effectiveness.
There is also talk of antiretrovirals. There are several types, for example reverse transcriptase inhibitors. These viruses, like HIV, have the genetic material in the form of RNA, which requires a reverse transcription to DNA, something that certainly only occurs (known) in RNA viruses. Or the protease inhibitors that the virus needs to infect a cell. But, as in AIDS patients, these drugs produce side effects since antiretrovirals are not superspecific molecules, in the end there are other proteins in the cell similar and necessary to which that drug binds. Thus, against HIV they have been very beneficial, so much that they have turned the disease into chronic, but those same effects in such a mild viral infection would be like killing flies with gunshots.
The Chinese government has begun to produce a Cuban brand antiviral, the IFNrec, which is a recombinant molecule of a type of interferon, a substance produced by the cells when they are infected by a virus and that increases that innate immunity of which he spoke before . This can be a measure to reduce symptoms, although like any medicine it is not harmless.
And finally, be careful about approving drugs in a hurry, without the proper scientific evidence, as happened with Tamiflú, an ineffective drug, but whose manufacturer got many millions of benefits because half-world governments swallowed the bulo, the fake- science. China wants to accelerate a clinical trial of a supposed Gilead drug, only used in the laboratory, and the company has already begun to increase its production "in case it ends up being approved." They are irresponsible measures.
The health system is key both to prevent expansion and, above all, to reduce mortality.
Is there a cause for alarm?
There is reason to be alert. The WHO has acted correctly in declaring the emergency, not because it is a very severe epidemic, where "only" 20% of those infected develop disease and of those who have been admitted due to pneumonia are over 50 years old or with previous illnesses, but because of the consequences it would have in regions like India or the African continent.
What we have to ask ourselves is why we care so much as societies for relatively little lethal epidemics, while we ignore the stroke caused by the pollution of cities or that 700 people die each year at work. Is it an atavistic, induced fear or both?
Yes, the consequences of how the epidemic is being addressed can be cause for alarm. On the one hand it is being used as a weapon in the commercial, media and political war against China. Something that, as we said, is adding fuel to the racist fire that runs through Europe and the world. Western media rejoice in the human and economic consequences on the Chinese people. On the other hand, the Chinese government is using the epidemic to increase control over the population, harvest huge amounts of data, try new artificial intelligence techniques (temperature control, facial recognition, etc.). Our duty is not to add more fuel to the fire by encouraging and transmitting bulls, whatever the political sign they may be. Prudence must prevail.
Economic consequences. The weakness of a growth-dependent market economy means that, on the one hand, a decrease in tourism and travel, consumption, uncertainty, etc. It can help the seemingly budding economic crisis, and on the other the great dependence on the production of Chinese technological goods, with tiny profit margins, endangers international technological trade.
Diseases are inevitable, technology should be at our service to mitigate, mitigate and sometimes eradicate them, but always with the best available evidence and prioritizing human rights and equality, it does not seem to be the case in this crisis.
“We have to go beyond the sort of, this small circle of progressive supporters to get to the general population so that when a jury comes in - not just in our case, any case - they aren’t in the dark,” he argued.
