https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/well-soon-find-out/
We’ll Soon Find Out
In an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier last Tuesday, FBI Director Chris Wray said, “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.” Like so much else in America’s tortured, distractible life these days, the meaning larded into that utterance went clear over the collective heads of just about everybody.
What was the key part of that statement? “For quite some time now….” Gee, really? Like, how long? One year? More than that? Maybe since March 2020? And you didn’t say anything, Mr. FBI Director? You didn’t do a thing to dispel the Covid-19 miasma of confusion that swaddled Washington DC like a smallpox blanket of yore? The question of where the novel coronavirus came from has been a ferocious national controversy since late 2019, you understand. Several government agencies, including the CIA and all the offices under the gigantic National Institutes of Health (NIH) – including the NIAID run for decades by Dr. Anthony Fauci — plus the FDA and CDC, tucked into the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)… all of these outfits have pretended to not know the true origin of Covid-19 for over three years. And the FBI Director, who could have shed some authoritative light on the matter by stepping up to a podium and weighing in, just let all that chaos roll?
And by-the-by, let’s not forget that the whole time Chris Wray knew with moderate certainty that Covid-19 came from the Wuhan virology lab, he was in charge of a battalion of FBI agents assigned to managing Twitter, Facebook, and Google — that is, the apps that comprise the digital Public Square — to make sure that anyone who opined about Covid coming from the Wuhan lab got censored, banished, cancelled, reputationally destroyed.
So, why did Mr. Wray make this statement on Tuesday… “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed…” Probably we’re hearing the old Modified Limited Hangout strategy, a venerable ruse, which is when a criminally culpable government throws the public a bone of admission about something that is common knowledge anyway — the thing everybody knows — while pretending that they were in on the common knowledge all along — which just adds another layer of perfidy to the giant matrix of lies laid down by US agency officials in this disgraceful episode of US history.
What Mr. Wray left out of his statement this week is any hint that a gang of US scientists and doctors under Dr. Fauci were directly and intimately involved in the activities at Wuhan that produced the virus that killed millions around the world, and led to the warp speed production of a “vaccine” mere weeks after the organism appeared — which will probably end up killing and maiming more people than the disease itself.
It happened also this past week that a team of distinguished medical warriors including Drs. Martin Makary of Johns Hopkins, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford testified before the opening session of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Dr. Makary began his remarks stating boldly: “The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government….”
…. Misinformation that…
- Covid was spread through surface transmission
- That vaccinated immunity was far greater than natural immunity
- That masks were effective. Now we have the definitive Cochrane review. What do you do with that review? Cochrane is the most authoritative evidence body in all of medicine and has been for decades. Do you just ignore it and not talk about it?
- That myocarditis was more common after the infection than after the vaccine. Not true, it is 4-28 times more common after the vaccine.
- That young people benefit from a booster, misinformation. Our two top experts on vaccines quit the FDA in protest over this particular issue, pushing boosters in young, healthy people. The data was never there. That’s why the CDC never disclosed hospitalization rates among boosted Americans under the age of 50.
- That vaccine mandates would increase vaccination rates. A George Mason University study shows that it didn’t. It did one thing, it created “Never-Vaxxers” who are now not getting the childhood vaccines they need to get.
“Over and over again, we’ve seen something that goes far beyond using your best judgment with the information at hand. We’ve seen something that is unforgivable, and that is the weaponization of medical research itself. The CDC putting out their own shoddy studies, like their own study on natural immunity looking at one state for two months, when they had data for years on all 50 states. Why did they only report that one sliver of data? Why did the salami slice the entire database? Because it gave them the result they wanted.
The same with the masking studies. The data has now caught up in giant systematic reviews, and public health officials were intellectually dishonest. They lied to the American people.”
This week, Edward Dowd, the former BlackRock trader-turned-Covid-statistician — and author of the new book Cause Unknown — released preliminary fourth quarter 2022 “excess deaths” numbers for group life insurance death claims compiled by the International Society of Actuaries (SOA).
For the age group up to age 44 excess deaths rose above the baseline (normal): 13 percent in October, 21 percent in November, and 43 percent in December. For the age group 45 to 64, the death rate above baseline rose 4 percent in October, 16 percent in November, and 35 percent in December. Mr. Dowd says that he is told the rates moving into the first quarter of 2023 are higher still. This is what’s known as a trend, and a pretty ominous one.
It boils down to an awful lot of people in the prime of life dying off, and more every month. Nobody in any of the US public health agencies is talking about this. One very prominent official, Rochelle Walensky, head of the CDC, is still busy arranging to dispense more Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines to America’s school-children — the “vaccines” being the prime suspects causing those stunning excess death rates among the young and employed demographic. Nice work, Rochelle!
How do the approximately 70 percent of vaxxed-up Americans deal with this reality? Many, of course, are noticing vaxxed family members, friends, colleagues, sports figures, acquaintances getting sick and dying of sudden heart failure, strokes, aggressive cancers, strange neurological problems, and other mystifying syndromes. The aggregate reaction so far seems to be a numb despair. But then, the still-living vaxxed also have to contend with the anxiety over what is going on in their own bodies. Perhaps they’ve heard whispers from the more extreme voices on the margins of this discussion that every single person who got vaxxed might be subject to an early death one way or another. That’d be a reason to withdraw into the first stage of the Kübler-Ross Transect of Grief, which is denial… and just hunker down there… for now. It’s an awful lot to contend with.
What’s next then? Consider that around 30 percent of Americans are not vaxxed, and are free of the anxiety that they are designated goners — notwithstanding the basic limits of the human condition. That 30 percent of Americans, and perhaps even some of the 70 percent vaxxed, will possibly be concerned with the other enormous threats to our national life: the insane Ukraine project, which looks like the overture to World War Three (no thank you); and the collapsing US economy, with features such as unaffordable food and fuel, scarcity of parts for fixing anything that’s broken, and a pretty good chance that retirement accounts will be wiped out in a coming equity-and-bond market “correction.”
All of which is to ask: when will the people of this land finally get pissed-off at the managers who are running everything? And when will the people start to express their new-found rage? I’ll make a wild-hair guess. By May, when the weather really starts lightening up, the people will be out in the streets looking to smash anything that appears to represent authority. Welcome to the season of real chaos and crisis, possibly many seasons, maybe years. Take great care of yourselves and your situations. Prepare if you can. How does it feel…to be on your own? the bard sang sixty years ago. We’ll soon find out.
....
https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/the-law-of-rule
The Law of Rule
As viewers and listeners of The Corbett Report will know by now, it's official: Canada has criminalized dissent.
Yes, Paul Rouleau—the judge appointed by the Canadian government to lead the Public Order Emergency Commission examining the Canadian government's decision to invoke the Emergencies Act last year to crack down on the Freedom Convoy—has delivered his thoroughly unsurprising verdict: the Canadian government was completely justified in its actions!
So what does this all mean?
For starters, it means that government officials now have carte blanche to invoke the Emergencies Act whenever they want in order to squelch any protest movement they dislike before the protest has the chance to effect any significant change.
But beyond that, we are witnessing the apotheosis of that rule by emergency that I identified last year as the new governing paradigm for the erstwhile "liberal Western democracies."
And if that realization doesn't send a chill down your spine, then you're not paying attention.
Strap in, folks. We're going for a deeeeeep dive into the murky world of law, philosophy and government this week.
THE DECISION
Last February, the Canadian government invoked the Emergencies Act to deal with the "national emergency" posed by the honking horns and bouncy castles of the Freedom Convoy protesters.
As I explained late last year, the Emergencies Act is the successor to the War Measures Act, a statute passed by Canadian Parliament in 1914 to provide the government with extraordinary emergency powers in times of war, invasion or insurrection. The War Measures Act was invoked only three times in Canadian history:
during WWI, when it was used to lock up Ukrainian Canadians in internment camps and to quell the Quebec City anti-conscription riots;
during WWII, when it was used to lock up Japanese Canadians (and anyone else deemed to be "about to engage in activities prejudicial to the public safety or the safety of the State") and to censor the press;
and during the October Crisis in 1970, when it was used to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, outlaw the Front de libération du Québec, and arrest hundreds of Canadians without charge.
If it occurs to you that each invocation of the War Measures Act involved unconscionable breaches of basic civil rights, then you're not alone. By 1988, the Canadian government—pressured by survivors of the Japanese internment and other critics of the act—was compelled to table a bill to replace the War Measures Act with a new piece of legislation. This new legislation would, in the words of one member of Parliament, "show those Canadians who have suffered that we have learned from the abuses of the past [. . .] show them our determination that such abuses will never happen again in this country [. . . and] restore their faith in this country and its democratic, political, and judicial processes."
Instead, Canadians got the Emergencies Act.
Now, in lieu of an act that could be invoked in the event of war or insurrection, granting the government the authority to violate basic civil liberties and upend the rule of law, there was an act that could be invoked in the event of war, insurrection, natural disaster, or perceived threat to national security (including, evidently, political protests involving honking horns and bouncy castles), granting the government the authority to violate basic civil liberties and upend the rule of law. (Huzzah?)
The seal on the Emegencies Act remained unbroken from its passage in 1988 until 2022, when the events of the Freedom Convoy necessitated—in the eyes of Trudeau's cabinet—an extraordinary crackdown.
At the time that the act was passed, freedom-loving Canadians were assured that the government would invoke it only in times of extreme emergency and would be careful to use the powers it afforded judiciously. But, as an extra layer of insurance against authoritarian overreach, the act also included a clause requiring "an inquiry to be held into the circumstances that led to the declaration being issued and the measures taken for dealing with the emergency." According to this provision, the inquiry's findings are to be presented in a report to Parliament within 360 days of the revocation of the emergency.
Thus it was that last April, Paul Rouleau—a long-time donor to the Liberal Party of Canada—was appointed to head the Public Order Emergency Commission examining the Liberal government's invocation of the act. And (wouldn't ya know?), Rouleau announced last week that Trudeau and his cronies were indeed justified in declaring the emergency, forcibly removing the Freedom Convoy protesters, freezing their bank accounts, and generally destroying the last vestige of free speech and permitted public protest in Canada.
For those who want all the nitty-gritty details, you'll want to check out my podcast episode on the inquiry from late last year, Canada's Freedom Convoy, my interview with Rob Kittredge and Hatim Kheir about their participation in the inquiry, and my brand-new podcast on Rouleau's report, Canada Criminalizes Dissent. And, of course, you can read the final report (all five volumes of it) for yourself on the commission's website.
But for those who prefer to cut to the chase, here are Rouleau's own words summarizing his report's main finding:
For reasons that I discuss in detail in the report, I have concluded that when the decision was made to invoke the act on February 14, 2022, cabinet had reasonable grounds to believe that there existed a national emergency arising from threats to the security of Canada that necessitated the taking of special temporary measures.
WHAT IT MEANS
Justice [sic] Rouleau is at pains to stress in his report and in his remarks that his decision does not bear on the legality of the government's actions (that's to be officially determined in a forthcoming judicial review of the matter). He also indicates that this was not a clear-cut, slam-dunk case: "I do not come to this conclusion easily, as I do not consider the factual basis for it to be overwhelming. Reasonable and informed people could reach a different conclusion that the one I arrived at."
Nonetheless, the findings of the commission will have important and long-lasting effects on the course of Canadian politics, society and law.
On the most basic practical level, Rouleau's report offers a list of 56 recommendations for the government to implement. As I discussed in my recent report, this list includes a number of recommendations for giving police and intelligence agencies even more power to spy on and coordinate military-like operations against the country's own citizens. It also contains recommendations on a wide range of subjects that seem beyond the scope of such an inquiry, including a recommendation that the government should "study the impact of social media" with the aim of "addressing the serious challenges that misinformation, disinformation, and other online harms present to individuals and Canadian society" and a recommendation encouraging the government to "continue with its study into cryptocurrencies."
On a broader level, Rouleau's ruling effectively breaks the seal on the Emergencies Act. After 34 years on the shelf, many of the questions surrounding the act have now been answered:
Would the act be used in peace time?
Would it be used against peaceful protesters?
Would it be used to suspend basic charter rights?
Would the government rig the inquiry into the emergency declaration by appointing a political crony and giving him a narrowly defined mandate that is bound to produce a report that exonerates the government?
The answer to all of these questions is a resounding: "You bet!"
That answer won't be surprising to regulars in The Corbett Report audience. But given that the majority of Canadians are (sadly) not Corbett Reporteers, it does have significance for the future of the country. How could Rouleau's finding do anything but embolden Trudeau's government (or indeed any future Canadian government) to invoke the Emergencies Act at the first sign of genuine mass protest? If the Canadian people go along with the commission's verdict, either by actively supporting it or passively accepting it, then what mechanism of accountability will ever cause any cabinet to think twice about pulling the emergency trigger?
This is why, as I pointed out in Canada Criminalizes Dissent, Rouleau emphasized that he saw the "first and foremost" task of the commission to be "to foster public confidence."
To "foster public confidence" in what, exactly? In the government itself, presumably. In the rectitude of its actions. In the proportionality of its response to the perception of the threat posed by non-violent protesters. And in the process itself. "Don't worry, Canadians," Rouleau wishes to say. "The government has investigated itself and found itself guiltless."
And, as I also observed in my recent podcast, this points once again to the centrality of our role in these events. We are not spectators in a stage play titled "The Emergencies Act and the Commission of Inquiry." Or, to the extent that we are, it is only because we fail to realize that this charade of an inquiry is precisely that—a piece of theatre put on solely for our benefit. A political puppet show designed to placate us into thinking that those people over there did something to those other people over there and that a Very Serious Person investigated that something and found it to be in order.
Regular viewers of my work will understand the importance of this observation: the tyrants can only function as tyrants if we acquiesce. We the people truly do hold the power, and political authoritarianism is indeed—as Étienne de La Boétie pointed out more than 500 years ago—a form of voluntary servitude.
In other words, if we decide, on the basis of this charade of an inquiry, that protesting is now illegal and thus not worth taking the risk, then Trudeau and his minions win. Indeed, the government only truly wins if we roll over and accept the commission's report at face value.
But there are even deeper, more fundamental questions that are raised by this entire affair. Questions that go beyond the boundaries of Canada or the time frame of 2022. Questions that threaten to topple our very conception of "the rule of law."
Rouleau himself even raised the specter of these questions in his report:
Tensions between order and freedom sit at the heart of our system of governance. Freedom cannot exist without order, because the machinery of order — such as procedures, laws, police, and courts — create the conditions for the protection of freedom, the enjoyment of freedom, and the mediation of conflicting freedoms. [. . .] It is commonly assumed or asserted that tensions and trade-offs between order and freedom are a distinctive problem of emergencies and emergency powers. In fact, they are not. The fundamental and inevitable tension between order and freedom is a constant; it is simply more visible, and more stark in a time of emergency. In times of emergency, however, freedoms that are usually unconstrained may suddenly be curtailed. This puts a spotlight on the clash of values.
What Rouleau writes is certainly true from the perspective of our Western concept of jurisprudence and political governance. But buried within that perspective are some hidden (and very ominous) assumptions about the rule of law.
THE LAW OF RULE
That freedom cannot function without order is one of those faux-profound truisms that appeal to people who have not thought seriously about the basis of their society and don't want to be troubled with anything that would deepen their understanding of the world.
Freedom cannot function without order. Therefore, we institute governments to codify the law and protect order. Or, in a nutshell, we need the "rule of law."
But even a philosophical novice can see the leap in logic inserted into this argument, namely that order must be codified and protected by government. That is the received wisdom that holds sway in the minds of the average inhabitant of a Western liberal democracy. For them, "the law" is whatever is written by legislators, who have been selected for their task by whatever form of political legitimization (usually election) applies in a given political jurisdiction.
But laws written down by lawmakers in fact represent one particular conception of law: statutory law. Opposed to this is the entire tradition of common law—a body of laws derived from the history of judgments of recognized arbiters (judges) within a given community.
In common law, "the law" is not a single, unified, monolithic, unquestionable set of rules that pertains everywhere and at all times within a given area. Nor is it something that has been written down by a ruler and that must be slavishly obeyed by the ruled.
Instead, the common law balances stability and fluidity, resting on a community's historical judgments, which act as guidelines for future rulings but remain capable of changing with the exigencies of circumstance.
It is not difficult to see who benefits when statutory law is conflated with "the law" in the minds of the public. Of course, the beneficiaries are the erstwhile "lawgivers" who are in the positions of power to set the rules governing society simply by putting pen to paper. In other words, the "rule of law" that the masses clamber for is—in a society of statutory law—exposed as simply the law of rule: those who rule make the laws.
The stark reality of the situation is that our concept of law differs only superficially from that promulgated by the monarchs and tyrants of old: that law is whatever the sovereign declares it to be, whenever he declares it. The masses have been placated by the various Magna Cartas and Constitutions and Charters of Rights and Freedoms that have arisen in our modern liberal democracies, each purporting to put checks and balances on the right of the sovereign to act as a tyrant. Under "the rule of law," we are told, even the sovereign must obey the restrictions and limitations that have been legislated into existence to protect our basic rights and liberties.
But, as Rouleau correctly observes, these "checks and balances" are a mirage, and it is at times of declared emergency that "the rule of law" is revealed to be nothing more than the law of rule. A state of exception exists in every statutory law, a moment of aporia in which all the rules and restrictions on the sovereign can be jettisoned at a moment's notice based on the sovereign's own decree. In Canada, that state of exception currently takes the form of the Emergencies Act.
It is in the invocation of the Emergencies Act, then, that we can see the modern system of checks and balances on political power for what it is: mere words, not worth the paper they're written on.
Once again, this will not be surprising to those who have studied this legal history in detail or those who are familiar with my work on States of Emergency. In that report, released just days before the invocation of the Emergencies Act, I outlined the new ruling paradigm for the planet—rule by emergency decree—and tied it into the rollout of the Homeland Security state post-9/11 and the rollout of the biosecurity state post-COVID.
In that work I quoted extensively from the brilliant Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, especially his seminal book on this topic, State of Exception, in which he observes that "modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system."
And, as Agamben sagely warns, our ignorance of the true nature of the legal paradigm that we are living under is no mere failure of understanding. It is a matter of life and death.
The juridical system of the West appears as a double structure, formed by two heterogeneous yet coordinated elements: one that is normative and juridical in the strict sense (which we can for convenience inscribe under the rubric potestas) and one that is anomic and metajuridical (which we can call by the name auctoritas).
The normative element needs the anomic element in order to be applied, but, on the other hand, auctoritas can assert itself only in the validation or suspension of potestas. Because it results from the dialectic between these two somewhat antagonistic yet functionally connected elements, the ancient dwelling of law is fragile and, in straining to maintain its own order, is always already in the process of ruin and decay. The state of exception is the device that must ultimately articulate and hold together the two aspects of the juridico-political machine by instituting a threshold of undecidability between anomie and nomos, between life and law, between auctoritas and potestas. It is founded on the essential fiction according to which anomie (in the form of auctoritas, living law, or the force of law) is still related to the juridical order and the power to suspend the norm has an immediate hold on life. As long as the two elements remain correlated yet conceptually, temporally, and subjectively distinct (as in republican Rome's contrast between the Senate and the people, or in medieval Europe's contrast between spiritual and temporal powers) their dialectic—though founded on a fiction—can nevertheless function in some way. But when they tend to coincide in a single person, when the state of exception, in which they are bound and blurred together, becomes the rule, then the juridico-political system transforms itself into a killing machine.
Whether we interpret Agamben's "killing machine" to be the use of a state of exception to authorize agents of the state to literally murder any declared enemy or we interpret it, in light of the Emergencies Act, to mean the use of a state of exception to subdue opponents of statutory laws mandating a medical intervention that has been shown to cause death, the result is the same. The stakes of this "game" of interplay between politics and jurisprudence could not be higher.
Indoctrinated as most people are in the belief that statutory law is "the law," and incapable as most people are of thinking beyond the boundaries of the pat truisms rulers throw out to placate the masses ("there can be no freedom without order"), it is difficult for us to conceive of a way out of this impasse.
If "the law" truly is whatever a government says it is, if we do need government in order to hand down these laws from on high and to police itself when it has abused those very laws, then what choice do we have? We must simply put ourselves at the behest of our rulers, hope they will make the right decisions, and hope we will have the firepower (literal or figurative) to resist them should we decide that it is necessary.
However, if we begin to interrogate our own assumptions, it is possible for us to formulate a seemingly equivalent but actually radically different concept of law and order. Yes, there can be no freedom without laws that form a framework for order. That is to say, there can be no freedom without common laws derived from centuries of community experience that form a framework for spontaneous order.
In this apparently slight philosophical adjustment, we begin to see a way to abolish the killing machine of the "law of rule" and to institute a true rule of law.
But as long as we continue to believe our erstwhile rulers' lie that "the law" is whatever they write down on their magical pieces of paper, we will be subject to the current governing paradigm of the planet—the law of rule—and the killing machine to which this law of rule inevitably gives rise.
The choice, as usual, is ours to make. And, as usual, we find that the true battlefield is not the streets of Ottawa but the space between our ears.
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