TexasCHLforum.com

chasfm11 wrote: ↑Sat May 09, 2020 7:53 am On my Facebook feed last night was a copy of the letter from Judge Jenkins which said that since Gov. Abbott had not listed lawyers on the list of businesses that could open, law offices could not. Of course, the wags posting it and commenting on it suggested that the letter was retaliation for a lawyer having gotten the hair salon owner so quickly through the Texas Supreme Court.

So unless Dallas and Dallas county have stopped arresting people (humor intended), the order seems to lean toward denying people their right to representation. I realize that lawyers don't need offices to get people out of jail but paralegals are used to do the leg work for legal actions and if the assistants cannot be in the offices to do that research, cases can be impacted.

The Annoyed Man wrote: ↑Tue Mar 17, 2020 11:25 am Anybody here old enough to remember what life was like before the Patriot Act?

Was it rescinded when Al Qaeda was defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan? How about after ISIS was defeated? Will it EVER be rescinded? Will gov’t EVER stop finding reasons to implement its provisions/restrictions? Will there ever NOT be an ongoing justification for the existence of the DHS; for the NSA spying on ALL Americans; etc., etc.?

There are some important principles at work here.....

1. Once liberty has been curtailed in the name of safety, it is never regained without violence.

2. The justifications for curtailing liberty in the name of safety ALWAYS arise out of a crisis made worse by the social autism of people who refuse to self-modify their behaviors in order to mitigate the crisis at hand.

3. By individually agreeing to modify certain of our behaviors in socially responsible ways for a temporary period of time until the crisis passes—thereby removing the opportunity for statism to override liberty—liberty can be protected from state-imposed "safety" measures that, one enacted, will become permanent impositions.

4. The degree to which the federal and various state and local gov’ts are imposing on individual liberty is directly proportional to the percentage of the population who are socially autistic and therefore unable (or more likely unwilling, from a lack of humility) to temporarily modify their own behaviors according to the crisis at hand.

5. Defend your liberty by any and all means. Sometimes, that means the exercise of two things: wisdom, and the long term view.

That’s my 5¢.

WASHINGTON – The U.S. government is in active talks with Facebook, Google and a wide array of tech companies and health experts about how they can use data gleaned from Americans’ phones to combat the novel coronavirus, including tracking whether people are keeping one another at safe distances to stem the outbreak.