Somewhere Near Davos, Hanging from a Cleft

The direction of the future can never be predicted or plotted with certainty; as the saying goes, man plans and God laughs. The turmoil that characterizes political affairs at the present time is a practical illustration of this proverbial truth. The array of contending variables on the contemporary national stage seems a veritable rat’s nest of identity crises and transition paradigms: civil disintegration, conservative revivalism, populist uprisings, autocratic leadership, and Globalist systematization. Which of these factors will prevail is an open question—a question which can be reformulated in terms of the distinction, lately widely discussed, between core countries and cleft countries.

A core country enjoys a stable central government, strong institutions, and a reasonable sense of unity, bound by ties of custom, economy, and heritage that allow for relative cultural harmony and political accord. One thinks of Japan. A cleft country, by contrast, is defined as a nation with cultural groupings sufficiently large and separate from one another in origin, faith, language and/or political convictions as to create profound or insoluble tensions. One thinks of worst-case scenarios like India or Yugoslavia splitting into territorial belligerents, or currently of Ukraine. Ivan Katchanovski’s Cleft Countries, written mainly for regional specialists, treats of the concept with specific reference to Ukraine and Moldova.

Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order deals with the subject on a larger, if controversial scale. According to Huntington, cultural tensions inevitably arise in “cleft countries… when a majority group belonging to one civilization attempts to define the state as its political instrument and to make its language, religion, and symbols those of the state.” The Clash of Civilizations proposed that a new kind of conflict, one centred on cultural identity, would become the focal point in the field of international relations. At the same time, cultural disparities and politically charged loyalties can and have become the focus of high-stress domestic relations as well.

The center cannot hold.

The phenomenon is treated from a somewhat different scholarly perspective in Immanuel Wallerstein’s compendious World-Systems Analysis. (See also his premonitory 2003 The Decline of American Power.) Writing from a Leftist orientation, Wallerstein provides a detailed if somewhat clotted overview of the complex mechanics of what is now called "globalization" spread across diverse fields of knowledge and practice, including professional disciplines, economic arrangements, “race, sexuality, geopolitical structures and relatively open frontiers.”

Referring to the “spirit of Davos,” Wallerstein maps and effectively endorses the globalist-inspired replacement of the nation-state in a vast, interlocking system encompassing a new kind of social and political reality. But his account of the fraught maneuverings in the international realm as it “reconfigures the world economy”—or, in the words of a WEF panelist, “recalibrates” the structures of governance, trade, finance and permitted discourse—may also be applied to the intrinsic sphere of the nation-state. As Wallerstein writes, “The moral constraints traditionally enforced both by states and by religious institutions are finding their efficacity considerably diminished.”

The concept of the “state-nation,” as opposed to the “nation-state,” has also gained some traction of late. In Crafting State Nations, Alfred Stepan et al. isolate a class of political entities characterized by “geographically concentrated ethnocommunal differences.” The attempt to weld these diverse identities into a single national unit or structure leads ultimately to internal political conflict. State-nations are volatile and subject to dissolution, in part like Huntington’s cleft countries and Wallerstein’s frail nation-states whirled asunder by the centrifugal forces of globalization. Admittedly, the difference between these state entities may appear to be more a question of terminology than of substance, although the issue here entails the forcible amalgamation of unassimilable groups and sectors. State nations are historical tinderboxes.

The situation is complicated by the rise of populist movements, such as the trucker convoys in Canada, the U.S. and other countries, which oppose both the surge of sectarian divisions and civil decay within the state as well as the drift toward globalist consolidation under the rubrics of the W.H.O., the U.N.’s Agenda 2030 and the Great Reset. Such patriot movements are intent on the restoration of cultural unity and national coherence rooted in scripture, common law, the constitutional tradition, the family and local government. The effort to build Galt-like parallel societies and “earthship” communities appeals to a growing number of people with pastoral sympathies, but remains a fringe development. Parallel digital networks and crypto currencies may contribute to the strengthening or rehabilitation of conservative traditions and institutions. At the end of the day, populist movements of a national stripe represent the only significant alternative to the breakup of civil society and the offloading of national responsibility to international organizations and agencies.

Hang on, little Eva.

This argument is brilliantly expounded by Yoram Hazony in Conservatism: A Rediscovery, which defends “economic liberties and other kinds of individual rights and freedoms,” in short, “the traditional pillars and cornerstones of Anglo-American civilization.” Hazony is aware of Huntington’s thesis—who isn’t?—and understands the fissiparous threat of violent disintegration posed by cleft countries, which can only be countered, he believes, by a “freedom-loving religious nationalism.” He would vigorously protest the dissipation of the nation state à la Wallerstein to non-local centers of power. “Reassigning the powers of government to international bodies,” he sagely asserts, “inevitably tend[s] toward arbitrariness and autocracy” rather than “protect[ing] the particularity of the nation and its traditions.”

In the light of these considerations, I am particularly concerned with developments in my own country, which, to quote Michael Walsh, “is now completing its post-Covid descent into a fascist tyranny.” Canada is no longer the proximately coherent nation it once was, despite its origin in two founding peoples and occasional secessionist rancor. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may have been correct when he claimed that Canada has “no core identity,” that it is a “post-national state” (to which he is accessory), which is to say that it is no longer even recognizably intelligible as an integral country, ruined by failed leadership like Trudeau’s own, digital surveillance of citizens, cowcatcher immigration policies, class divisions, ruinous economic policies, tensions between eastern and western provinces, and competing cultural, tribal and political internal groups. It has become a textbook cleft country, provoked and embittered by the sidelining of the Constitution and a derecho of draconian measures, such as vaccine mandates, travel restrictions, information censorship, punitive carbon taxes and the like.

The U.S. has also devolved into a cleft country marked by an open border, millions of illegal refugees, ethnic voting blocs, artificially stoked racial hostilities, irregular elections, media censorship, administrative incompetence, political dystrophy, and domestic terrorists setting cities aflame. The Financial Times foresees the possibility of civil war. National tensions are at their highest level since the 1860s. The country’s motto might as well be E Pluribus, Multi Plures.

Obviously, with only few exceptions major nations with large populations are almost inevitably to some extent cleft, divided by hierarchical levels of political and economic structures. The danger is that social and cultural fissures—“fault lines” in Huntington’s terms—are always in danger of widening. When the “core,” the common set of beliefs and customs, begins to dissolve, the constituent groups that make up the nation’s census, regardless of power differentials, then become not partners in a common project but antagonists in a culture war no one can win—except, perhaps, the cleftocrats.

Hurtling toward the abyss?

As former Canadian provincial premier Brian Peckford said in a speech delivered on the steps of the British Columbia Legislature, “A system that sees our society being run by the four horsemen—big government, big press, big pharma and big tech,” will inexorably destabilize the cohesive nation-state and render the individual vulnerable to a cabal of international unelected bureaucrats and conscienceless power-brokers. The concept of individual autonomy in functioning democracies is plainly under siege. “Unless we take matters in our own hands and move forward with new paradigms,” he avers, and pursue the struggle against “the brutal reality of a failed existing system,” it will be game, set, match. Peckford is right, of course, but so is Huntington. 

“The nations of the West are hurtling toward the abyss,” Hazony warns. Democratic institutions are increasingly at risk and the bonds of social unity in nation after nation are fraying. The dilemma for many of us is that we are living in uncharted territory without a compass to provide direction. Here be dragons. A great decoupling of the historical tenses seems underway as past, present and future have begun to feel disconnected and temporally unrelated, unamenable to reflective extrapolation for guidance and understanding. History does not always repeat itself. As founder and president of the Brownstone Institute Jeffrey Tucker writes of our cultural moment, “it is hard to find historical examples.” Something unprecedented seems to be emerging.

The fact is, we are living in a cleft world. May God help us.

The Pandemic State Is Here to Stay

In a major essay for Hillsdale College’s Imprimis series, Michael Rectenwald points to the 2018 CLADE X and 2019 Event 201 pandemic simulations involving putatively benign collaborations between the World Economic Forum, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

These exercises eerily “anticipated almost every eventuality of the actual Covid crisis, most notably the responses by governments, health agencies, the media, tech companies, and elements of the public. The responses and their effects,” he continues, “included worldwide lockdowns, the collapse of businesses and industries, the adoption of biometric surveillance technologies, an emphasis on social media censorship to combat ‘misinformation,’ the flooding of social and legacy media with ‘authoritative sources,’ widespread riots, and mass unemployment,” including the record gains enjoyed by companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google entailing a massive transfer of wealth from the lower-and-middle stratum to the top echelon.

Similarly, writing in EarthNewspaper, Gary Barnett has no doubt that an “environment of deception” has been created and an enormous boondoggle perpetrated by a global network of royals, politicians, Big Tech moguls, Big Pharma, billionaires, and other elites, including Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum and its legion of influential graduates. The evidence he assembles is damning: area-variation mortality counts, suggesting differing batches of vaccines for experimental purposes; inflation of Covid casualty numbers; promotion of the killer drug Remdesivir; hospitals monetarily incentivized to report Covid cases and deaths, leading to a statistical explosion; and the use of ventilators, which produced mortality rates varying for different age groups from 76.4 percent to 97.2 percent.

Distress signal.

Clearly, the authorities went about their business in the most unproductive and dangerous manner conceivable—but this is only to give them the benefit of the doubt. There is far more going on and far more at stake than most people realize, as former BlackRock portfolio manager and investor Edward Dowd has vividly exposed in a blockbuster interview with Naomi Wolf and a follow-up with Alex Jones. The BMJ reports that scientific progress has been “thwarted by the ownership of data and knowledge because industry suppresses negative trial results [and] fails to report adverse events.” Scientific integrity has been radically compromised. The evidence of fraud is both mind-blowing and undeniable. It should be glaringly obvious by this time that a tectonic shift in medical, corporate, economic and power paradigms has occurred before our very eyes.

The new social and political structure that has come about is what law professor Bruce Pardy calls the “pandemic managerial state,” which runs roughshod over every Constitutional or legal bulwark. His conclusion is demoralising, to say the least: “The Covid-19 regime is just the tip of the iceberg. It is based upon an ideological premise: individual sovereignty must yield to the expertise, authority and discretion of officials acting in the name of public welfare and progressive causes.”

The real question is whether we will ever return to “normal,” to life as we once felt and experienced it, and the answer is: No, at least not in our lifetimes. We have Klaus Schwab’s word for it in Covid-19: The Great Reset.

“Many of us are pondering when things will return to normal,” he writes. “The short response is: never. The world as we knew it in the early months of 2020 is no more.”

He is correct.

The governing elect and their enablers—the medical colleges and the media—still have the support of a substantial portion of the public: the elite classes and the financially insulated on the one hand, the parasitical, financially-recipient classes on the other. Their authoritarian grip on power will be hard to dislodge. Even after the pandemic is officially declared over, the public will remain fearful and politically tenderized. Irrational attitudes fostered by the authorities will persist. Millions will continue wearing masks for years to come.

Public venues like restaurants will be prone to continue enforcing vaccine protocols. Many will continue to blame the unvaccinated for a failed vaccine, ensuring virulent social divisions. Meanwhile, the official and media narrative, that pervasive machinery of lies, will credit the mask/lockdown/vaccination program for having defeated the pandemic when it was the very mandate policy itself that caused incalculable harm and prolonged the disaster.

Say no more.

In many countries a majority of citizens obligingly fall for the great swindle. In his seminal essay Discours de la servitude volontaire, generally rendered in English as The Politics of Obedience, the 16th-century political philosopher Étienne de la Boétie cogently analysed the dynamic in play. “What strange affair is this?” he asks. “To see a vast multitude of people not merely obeying, but welcoming servility… deprived of the bulk of their revenues, their fields plundered, their dwellings robbed?”

His basic insight is that despotism owes its hegemony primarily to popular acceptance. There seems to be no help for it, except in those rare historical cases where a “spirited people” rises up against their ruthless leaders and expels “the villainous dross of the nation,” thus refusing “to give consent to their own woe.” [My translation.] Regrettably, in most Western nations today, there are simply not enough Trucker Convoys intent on restoring their rights and freedoms, too many people who give consent to their own servitude, too many non-truckers on the road to serfdom.

The “pandemic state” is here to stay for the indefinite future, though in different manifestations. Political authority has devolved into one or another form of totalitarian governance, characterized by disparate structures of repression as they arise across the political spectrum. In his must-read Scanned: Why Vaccine Passports and Digital IDs Will Mean the End of Privacy and Personal Freedom, Nick Corbishley exposes the technology of population control, showing that a return to normality is a mere fantasy.

Read it and weep.

No new virus need emerge. Pandemic psychology controls the public mind and pandemic policy has prepared the way for a new political order—Schwab’s “global strategic framework of governance,” that is, a fascist regime in all but name. The norms and customs we took for granted will not return. Metaphorically, it is as if someone who has been severely wounded or disfigured must still bear the scars and impediments of his trauma. The handicap is here to stay.

Moreover, far too many people seem to love their injury. There is no going back to a previous condition of comparative innocence and social flexibility. The state will continue to further corrode traditional liberties—privacy, assembly, mobility, communication, currency—towards the goal of citizen submission to a dominant citadel of power, an administrative panopticon. And as de la Boétie understood, the majority will willingly comply, the paradoxical source of their own affliction. The lockdown state has the blessing of the multitudes. When exfiltration is not possible, there is little option for the remnant but to resist inwardly and refuse to give consent to their political abusers.

The heritage of the Judeo-Christian West, based on faith in a higher power, the rule of law, and the sovereignty of the individual, has been decisively breached. We now inhabit a time of domestic menace. For those who continue to cherish their liberty, the best we can do is plan and cope.

THE COLUMN: Sic Semper Tyrannis

On this, the second anniversary of The-Pipeline.org, we present the first of a series of weekly columns that will appear each Monday morning. Everything on the table, nothing off the table. mw

And so we near the end of the Great Pandemic Hoax of 2019-22, an unprecedented and breathtaking power grab by governments around the world to seize powers far beyond their constitutional allotments and to transform a relatively minor flu virus — however originated and for what ill purposes — into a weapon of mass economic and emotional destruction whose effects will be felt for years and decades to come. It has been a textbook example of tyranny.

Consider it a warning shot, though, because while Covid may finally have been exposed for the non-apocalyptic event it always was, such tyranny is only the beginning until we put a stop to it. Put a stop to extra-legal "emergency" measures that are transparently and insultingly fraudulent, and which are invoked in the name of the "greater good." Put a stop to the notion of judicially sanctioned "protected classes" in a formerly classless society. Put to stop the notion of a "New Normal" of privation, deviancy, and spiritual and material penury imposed by Leftists as they continue their centuries-old task of undermining every tenet of Western Civilization in the name of "equity" — in a world in which equality is aspirational at best and equity is impossible.

And, once and for all, put paid to the notion that "when you've got your health you've got everything,"  the motto of a nation of neurotic hypochondriacs that is fundamentally at odds with every principle of the moral and socially productive life. For under this seemingly anodyne contention lies a wealth of mischief, chief among them the idea that your fellow citizens pose an existential threat to you by their refusal to conform, and thus can and should be restricted, incarcerated, or even killed as the need arises. And all in the name of Socialism, whether National or international.

Nicolae and Elena in happier times.

As we've seen via a recent study by the Johns Hopkin University (a study of studies, really), the lockdowns imposed by states, countries, and municipalities everywhere in the name of "mitigating" the spread of an illness with a 99 percent survival rate in the name of public health were completely ineffective.

Far better to have done nothing at all; instead, families were separated, the elderly (those most at risk from the respirational difficulties caused by the likely Chinese-manufactured bioweapon) died alone and often in squalor; weddings and funerals were canceled or held "virtually"; businesses were shuttered and driven into bankruptcy; more than two years of schooling were ripped away from forcibly masked children; and colleges and universities continued their descent into mere parental-money shakedown rackets by offering education-by-Zoom as they continued with their main mission of gobbling up real estate to take it off the tax rolls and fatten their endowments.

And the only people held responsible for this sanctioned crime wave were... you. You, the uncooperative, the recalcitrant, the deplorable. You, the anti-social, the rebellious, the individualists, the fighters, the darers, the doers. You, the people who founded this country in defiance of central authority and rule-by-pronunciamento, you who pledge allegiance not to a political party or a strong leader, but to a flag and to the country for which it stands. One nation, under a God whom the other side has no use for, but only contempt. Just as they do for you.

It's become axiomatic that inside every leftist is a totalitarian screaming to get out. So if there's one positive thing Covid has done is identify those people for all to see: the slave-muzzle wearers, proudly exhibiting their servile natures. They're the Karens, the mask nazis, the buttinskis who can't leave you or your family alone, the ones who screech at the sight of the unmasked like Donald Sutherland ratting out a real human being at the end of the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers:

These are the same people who want to force you into electric cars but not provide a reliable source of electricity for them. Who wish to destroy the energy industries that built our nation, and leave you freezing or sweltering in the dark. Who condone and even encourage mass looting of shops, the murder of small Asian women waiting for a subway train, the shooting of policemen by the underclass, and the flouting of nearly every law of civilized behavior on the streets in the name of "social justice." And these are the people who, under the rubric of "climate change" and "the Great Reset," want to strip you of your home, your cars, your livelihood and, eventually, your life. No matter which office they hold, high or low or none at all, these people are your enemies and should be treated accordingly.

Make no mistake: Covid was only a beta-test, one that a submissive population passed with flying colors. Instantly repealed, without all that pesky business about amending the Constitution, were the first, fourth, fifth, and the eighth articles of the Bill of Rights. (The ninth and tenth, of course, have long since been rendered null, void, and nugatory. You remember them, the ones that reserve all unenumerated rights not mentioned in the Constitution to the people and the states.) This is why former president Barack Obama infamously referred to our founding document as a "charter of negative liberties." Which is precisely what the Founders desired.

Read 'em and weep.

Ah, but "affirmative" rights sound so much better. Like FDR's Four Freedoms:  what could possibly go wrong with having government affirmatively promise you freedom of speech (already guaranteed by the first amendment), freedom of worship (ditto), freedom from want and freedom from fear. While they were never legislated formally, the first two were superfluous — and have in any case been repealed by Covid — and the latter two have been implemented by stealth under the false flags of "compassion" and "safety."

Affirmative rights, however, are essentially fascistic; your "safety" and material security, in the zero-sum mindsets of governments everywhere, come at the expense of someone else. Feminized guarantees of "safety" and "security" were standard fare in every European communist country until its collapse between 1989 and 1991, It's instructive to note that those are the same terms in which censorious social-media sites such as Twitter (from which I was "permanently banned" in August 2020 for unspecified "targeted harassment") and Facebook (in whose Sugarmountain Gulag I am currently spending another two weeks for "hate speech," which is Zuckerspeak for disparagement) couch their own "rules" and "community standards." The sooner both are destroyed, the better and freer everybody will be.

For when the preference cascade begins, punks, tyrants and dictators need to watch their backs as the real workers of the world unite. I spent the years between 1985 and 1991 shuttling in and out of East Germany and the Soviet Union, was in Berlin as the Wall was being torn down, and departed from Moscow just before the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in the summer of '91. (The Soviet Union folded four months later.) I stood on Fisherman's Bastion in Budapest with Hungarian friends in late 1989, looking east over the Danube, as they expressed their fears of an imminent invasion from Romanian troops. Hope was in the air — the Wall had just fallen — but uncertainty still ruled. Would the useless George H.W. Bush administration come to their aid? Or, once again, would the fascist-communist tanks roll?

Instead, a miracle happened: the people, united, were not to be defeated.

On Dec. 21, 1989, the old dictator went to the well once too often, and called a rally he couldn't control. As the people's voices rose against him (if the Romanians had had trucks, they would have used them), his voice broke, his expression changed from confidence to befuddlement, the television transmission stopped, and he was whisked away. A rebellion that had started with a lone priest in the ethnically Hungarian town of Timișoara spread eastward across the country to Bucharest. The next day, the evil pair tried to escape by helicopter, but by then the army had switched sides. Ceaușescu and his wife were arrested, tried, and summarily executed.

What's the old saying?

Oh yes: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The Court Steps in to the War on Greenhouse Gases

What’s a g,reenhouse gas and who and how can regulate it? The Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases in a quartet of appeals from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Their decision could spell the end of the administrative agencies' hitherto unbounded, extra-legal ability to "regulate" U.S. business.

The matter begins with then-President Obama’s  Clean Power Plan of 2015. That plan established guidelines for states to limit carbon dioxide emissions.  The essential features of the plan, which was designed to boost renewable energy sources in place of fossil-fuel generated power, set standards to reduce CO2 emissions by 32 percent from 2005 levels by the year 2030. It required each state to submit plans to the EPA for reaching those goals and gave them until 2022 to comply with the approved plans. This grand plan was short-lived. Two years later under President Trump the head of the EPA proposed a rule repealing the plan Subsequently, after a review, the EPA did repeal the Plan.

Barry's brainchild.

Administration action was not the sole block to enforcement of the Plan --  industry groups and twenty-seven states filed legal challenges to the Obama plan:

because the E.P.A. assumed utilities could reduce emissions at individual plants by taking actions outside of those plants — say, by replacing coal plants with wind farms elsewhere. Industry groups and more than two dozen states challenged this move in court, arguing that the EPA can look only at cleanup measures that can be undertaken at the plants themselves.

The states argued that the Clean Air Act under which the EPA was acting never gave the agency the power to regulate CO2 emissions and the Supreme Court held enforcement of the plan in abeyance until the court challenges could be resolved.

It's unprecedented for the Supreme Court to step in and block a federal regulation like this, before review by an appeals court. None of the justices gave any explanation for the move. The justices voting to block the rule were Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy.

In January of this year after lengthy hearings on the issue the U.S.  Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck down the effort to repeal the Obama emissions plan. That Court remanded the matter to the EPA to craft regulations on power plant CO2 emissions.

The Court noted that the Clean Air Act grants the federal agencies the power to regulate air pollution. Significantly, however, the Court did not direct the EPA to readopt the Obama plan that Trump had repealed. That means EPA has to start over, and the latest  Supreme Court action means the EPA cannot even begin the process until sometime in the middle or late 2022 after the Court decides the case it just decided to hear. So none of the EPA regulations in this area are operable now. To me, it’s a stretch  to consider CO2 a pollutant. Nevertheless, as the D.C. Court observes in its opinion the Supreme Court has held that CO2 is a pollutant:

It was not until the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, however, that the Court confirmed that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions constituted “air pollutant[s]” covered by the Clean Air Act. The Supreme Court explained that the Clean Air Act’s “sweeping definition of ‘air pollutant’ includes ‘any air pollution agent or combination of such agents, including any physical, chemical . . . substance or matter which is emitted into or otherwise enters the ambient air...'  On its face, the definition embraces all airborne compounds of whatever stripe, and underscores that intent through the repeated use of the word ‘any.’ Given that statutory command, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA “can avoid taking further action” to regulate such pollution “only if it determines that greenhouse gases do not contribute to climate change” or offers some reasonable explanation for not resolving that question.

You can practically smell the absence of CO2.

At no point to my knowledge has Congress held that it considers C02 a pollutant. The closest statutory language I can find is in the 1987  Global Climate Protection Act which found that “manmade pollution[,]” including “the release of carbon dioxide... may be producing a long-term and substantial increase in the average temperature on Earth[.]”

The  four cases which are joined in the matter  in which the Supreme Court just granted certiorari  cover a variety of related issues including the scope of the Clean Air Act  whether regulations must be based on existing technologies and methods at existing sources (that is, individual plants) and not industry-wide ones, and whether  the EPA usurped state regulatory powers.

In 42 U.S.C. § 7411(d), an ancillary provision of the Clean Air Act, did Congress constitutionally authorize the Environmental Protection Agency to issue significant rules—including those capable of reshaping the nation's electricity grids and unilaterally decarbonizing virtually any sector of the economy—without any limits on what the agency can require so long as it considers cost, non-air impacts, and energy requirements?

Whether 42 U.S.C. § 7411(d), which authorizes the EPA to impose standards "for any existing source" based on limits "achievable through the application of the best system of emission reduction" that has been "adequately demonstrated," grants the EPA authority not only to impose standards based on technology and methods that can be applied at and achieved by that existing source, but also allows the agency to develop industry-wide systems such as cap-and-trade regimes.

Whether 42 U.S.C. § 7411(d) clearly authorizes EPA to decide such matters of vast economic and political significance as whether and how to restructure the nation's energy system... Can EPA promulgate regulations for existing stationary sources that require States to apply binding nationwide "performance standards" at a generation-sector-wide level, instead of at the individual source level, and can those regulations deprive States of all implementation and decision making power in creating their Section 111(d) plans?

Can EPA promulgate regulations for existing stationary sources that require States to apply binding nationwide "performance standards" at a generation-sector-wide level, instead of at the individual source level, and can those regulations deprive States of all implementation and decision making power in creating their Section 111(d) plans?

Professor Jonathan Adler offers up the most valuable of the commentaries on these matters I can find.

This case could be tremendously significant beyond the question of the EPA's regulation of greenhouse gases because (as detailed below) the questions presented encompass both the immediate question of what authority the EPA has under Section 7411 of the Clean Air Act, but also the broader question of how prescriptive Congress must be when delegating broad regulatory authority to federal agencies. This gives the Court room to refine and expand the "major questions" doctrine (as I have suggested it might want to do), as well as to perhaps identify some of the outer limits on delegation more generally.

Thanks, Nixon!

It’s peculiar, as Adler also observes, that the Court took up the case now as the Biden Administration has not even proposed its own regulations. Four of the justices had to agree to hear theses cases for the writ of certiorari to be granted. To Adler, and me, the fact that at least four justices are concerned about the broad grant of administrative power to the EPA hints at some effort to require Congress to be more “prescriptive” to regulatory authority to administrative agencies. Perhaps the days of Congress leaving to the executive branch to fill in broad empty provisions in legislation will be coming to an end. Perhaps , as well, the Court is rethinking its decision in Massachusetts vs. EPA on CO2 emissions as pollutants.

However, this case is resolved -- and I dare not predict these days -- it will have far reaching implications for environmental law. As well, it may set new boundaries on the interactions between Congress and the executive branch and whether the administrative agencies’ powers, so long given very broad reach, will be clipped and Congress forced to exercise its constitutional responsibilities.

The Coming Viral Dictatorship

A pivotal feature of dictatorial regimes is the institutional lie, expressed as an unfounded message of millennial hope, an ever-changing set of legislated policies, and the tendency of authoritarian leaders to violate their own axioms and edicts. We see this happening before our eyes as a Covid-19 tyranny takes root on our own soil.

The manifold inconsistencies and deceptions that circulate regarding the draconian mandates and coercive measures imposed by Big Government to combat the Covid pandemic should by now have alerted the public to their suspicious nature. We have observed the extent to which these ordinances are regularly flouted by the authorities, who have been seen without their masks, disregarding social distancing rules, and travelling during lockdowns. Such exemptions are obviously a privilege reserved only to the elites, who do not scruple to lecture us on the current proprieties.

One popular slogan that we meet everywhere, on radio and TV, on the Internet, and emblazoned on ubiquitous signage, is particularly irritating: “We’re All In This Together.” Clearly, we are not. While small business owners and entrepreneurs struggle with bankruptcy as their establishments are closed down, Big Box stores operate at full capacity, teachers retain handsome salaries while refusing to enter their classrooms, government personnel continue to be paid in absentia, and politicians suffer no loss of ample remuneration.

This means you.

Weddings, church services, funerals, social gatherings, holiday celebrations and anti-lockdown protests are either curtailed or banned to prevent proximity transmission of the virus; BLM demonstrations involving thousands of people cheek-by-jowl agitating for “social justice” are permitted and encouraged. Doctors are here to serve their patients; now many have embraced telemedicine, which does not impact their fees as it does their effectiveness. Diagnosis at a distance is not reliable medicine, though it is lucrative medicine. The overall hypocrisy that confronts us at every level of political, corporate and professional society is so blatant as to be unbelievable—except it is entirely believable. We are manifestly not in this all together, not by a long shot.

Another sedative to which we are constantly exposed is the official platitude that the mandates under which we malinger are intended “to protect public health and safety.” The collateral effects of this faux campaign have, in fact, endangered public health and safety. The category of “excess deaths” owing to delayed medical procedures for cancer, Alzheimer's, heart ailments and diabetes, among other conditions, including critical stress, depressive suicides, and adverse reactions and deaths linked to the Covid vaccines now arguably surpass Covid morbidity numbers—which themselves appear to have been grossly inflated. Indeed, in a crowning irony, the virus may itself be “boosted” by iatrogenic interventions. One need only consult virologist and immunologist Robert Malone, the actual inventor of the mRNA vaccines, who warns against them as Covid-19 suppressants. 

We were assured that vaccine passports were the route to “public health and safety” and that life would soon be back to normal. Now triple vaxxing, masks and renewed lockdowns have become mandatory in many jurisdictions and nations. The temptation to blame and penalize the unvaccinated for any upsurge of “cases” is spreading and may easily translate into second-class status for the unvaccinated and a policy of forced internment. 

But who are the “unvaccinated”?  Israel’s Director of the Ziv Medical Center Dr. Salman Zarka admits that the definition is changing: “We are updating what it means to be vaccinated.” In the absence of a third jab (and counting), even the double-vaxxed fall into the category of “unvaccinated.” As Kit Knightly writes in off-guardian, “Israel is the petri dish”; if it works there, the rest of the world will follow suit. Of course, in another sense of the phrase, it doesn’t really “work there.” A multi-sourced chart published in the Financial Times, comparing over-vaxxed Israel to under-vaxxed Egypt, provides a sobering metric. Egypt is doing at least an order of magnitude better than Israel. Equally distressing, on August 22 West Virginia governor Jim Justice reported a 26 percent surge among the fully vaccinated and a 25 percent increase in vaccinated deaths. This surely is not a one-off.

Where do you think you're going?

It should be obvious by this time that we are dealing with a vast shell game. In an open letter to the Canadian Minister of Health, McGill University theology professor Douglas Farrow argues, correctly, that vaccine mandates are incoherent. That is surely the right word. Masks were supposed to keep us safe. They didn’t do very well, so the first jab was introduced, which should have offered immunity. Then came a second jab, followed by a third and counting. Then came the vaccine passports. Meanwhile, as noted, double-and-triple-jabbed Israelis are still fighting infection and transmission and have now even been refused entry to Portugal and to open, prosperous Sweden.

It is no surprise, at least among the concerned, that distrust is growing of our health authorities, the political class and the collusive “misleadia,” assiduously promoting a medical dogma that is plainly muddled, deceptive and hypocritical. It is also, to put it bluntly, totalitarian.

The next step is the construction of quarantine or internment camps, as currently planned in Australia. Similarly, in the U.S. the CDC has proposed a “shielding approach” that would establish “a group of shelters such as schools, community buildings within a camp/sector…where high-risk individuals (the unvaccinated) are physically isolated together.” As if this weren’t plain enough, the proposal states that “High-risk individuals would be temporarily relocated to safe or ‘green zones’ established at the household, neighborhood, camp/sector or community level… They would have minimal contact with family members and other low-risk residents.” 

Meanwhile, the National Guard is in process of hiring “internment resettlement specialists” to supervise detention operations and “provide guidance to individual prisoners.” It is not clear from the explanatory description what this program precisely entails, but it doesn’t augur well. On August 6, 2021, governor Bill Lee of Tennessee signed an executive order authorizing involuntary internment of targeted citizens, under the convenient designation of “regulatory flexibilities.”

Not to be outdone, the Department of Homeland Security claims that those resisting the vaccines pose a “potential terror threat.” If you oppose the vaccines, you are an “extremist.” The document is very clear: “These extremists may seek to exploit the emergence of COVID-19 variants by viewing the potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the United States as a rationale to conduct attacks.” Bill HR 4980 currently before Congress would place unvaccinated persons on a No-Fly list and lead inexorably to a No-Buy gun control law. A No-Buy gun list would prevent people from arming themselves. As they say, you have been warned.

Welcome to Australia.

My own country of Canada marches in lockstep with the heavily mandated nations of Israel, the U.K. and, of course, Australia and parts of the U.S. According to NaturalNews, the Canadian government has ordered enough vaccines to inoculate every man, woman and child many times over for the next three years, having stockpiled 293 million doses for a population of 38 million. The report continues: “Just months ago, the Covid-19 vaccines were hailed as a ‘miracle of science’ that were putting an ‘end to the pandemic’… But now the narrative has changed” and we can expect more censorship, travel restriction, contact tracing, deprivation of human rights, dodgy testing, and mask and vaccine mandates. The fear is that even supermarkets may eventually be placed off limits for the unvaccinated, forcing one to rely on doorstep deliveries. 

As we’ve seen, this despotic program is being implemented in the name of “protecting public health and safety.” It appears, rather, as if it is being put in practice to create a system of “vaccine enslavement” and authoritarian control. Our Prime Minister, after all, is on record as admiring the “basic dictatorship” of Communist China.

What next? One shudders to think. Where next? Who's next?

How to Dodge the Dreaded Covid

The sheer absurdity of the Covid hoax in one brief video:

Take off your muzzle, throw it in the trash, and never use it again. You're a citizen of a free republic, not a subject of a tinpot tyranny.

One Age, Two Zeitgeists

Joe Biden making a “pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide but to unify,” seems rich coming from someone representing a political party which has been unremittingly intent on undermining the 45th president since before day one. But there it is. On the left, hypocrisy never flags.

I am not, of course, an American but I do make claim to being an irredeemably deplorable conservative chump. As such, I have beliefs. Here is a short selective account.

The way we were.

What else do I or don’t I believe? Lots actually. But you get the picture. And I’d like to think, and do think, that my beliefs are shared, to a very great extent, by people on the conservative side of the political spectrum. But many people don’t share them. In fact, it is safe to say, those belonging to the modern left share none of them. The two sets of beliefs are non-intersecting.

In the west, there is no longer one defining spirit and mood of the times. There are two. Truly, we are a house (acrimoniously) divided. Thus, calls for the U.S. population or the population of any western nation to come together in unity is pie-in-the-sky.

Let me put it this way. Will those on the political left ever be happy to go along with conservative government? It’s a silly question. They have an agenda and it doesn’t include kumbaya get-togethers with their political opponents.

The way we are.

How about those who collectively might be called right of centre? Okay, there are many milquetoasts-cum-pantywaists in this eclectic category of people. They are easily peeled off to become useful idiots on behalf of the left; e.g., John Kasich, Jeff Flake, Mitt Romney, among political notables in the US. However, stalwart conservatives simply can’t buy any of the left’s bill of goods.

Consider the antithesis of each of the beliefs which I set out above. Put them together and what do you get? A destructive empire of lies; undermining the values which have served us so well for so long. Hard to swallow. How can anyone swallow them? Many evidently can.

Give or take, half the United States votes left. And this isn’t the left of such a little way back as the time of Bill Clinton. This is the modern loony version, exemplified by the Squad and the 110-page Biden - Sanders manifesto.

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It’s an amazing document. I was struck by a comparison of Australia’s scheme in 2009 to help the economy out of recession and increase the energy efficiency of houses, by providing the installation of free insulating ceiling batts, with a much grander U.S. scheme, of “upgrades to up to two million low-income households [and to] incentivize tens of billions of dollars in private-sector investment to retrofit four million buildings.” What could possibly go wrong?

In Australia a lot went wrong in a short space of time. Four deaths and ninety-four house fires later the so-called “pink-batts scheme” was quickly canned. There’s electrical wire in those roof spaces and, overnight, lots of ill-trained wannabes became batt installers.

Of course, I have barely touched on the madness in the manifesto. And before you say no-one reads this kind of thing, the universities are churning out people who don’t have to. They live and breathe its destructive dystopian drivel and go on to occupy every nook and cranny of influence.

The political battle is no longer between adversaries who have broad objectives in common. And, make no mistake, the battle is uneven. Among the political class, stalwart conservatives are a declining breed. A potential saving is that their values and policies are still broadly in sync with the instincts of blue-collar and agricultural workers and, more generally, with that body of the population which through religious faith or through life experiences has managed to retain their common sense despite the onslaught of absurd wokeness. Does this offer a chance to hold back the leftist tide? Can the tide ever be turned?

The way we're headed.

I used to think Trump was the last best hope, as slim as it was. Without at all counting him out at this stage, I can’t afford to think that now. The fight has to be fought however slim the chances of victory. Covid exposes the leftist creed for what it is: cowardly, mean, miserable and godless. Evidently, those on the left can never get enough of masking, social distancing, hand-sanitizing, lockdowns, curfews, any and all rules restricting freedom; including, notably, the freedom to worship. Compliant and dependent, searching for safety in a government womb.

Idolatry had many forms in the past. Golden idols loomed large. Money is a more modern manifestation. Both seem less foul than genuflecting to government. Whining to be kept safe by the nanny state is not edifying.

The Day of the Conman

British writer Frederick Forsyth, best known for his thrillers, The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, and The Dogs of War, is now 81, and so has seen something of life: former RAF pilot, journalist and putative op for MI6. Like everyone over the age of 50, he understands that the response to the Dreaded Covid has been not only absurdly overwrought, but is in fact downright malignant.

Here he is today in Britain's Daily Express:

He's right, of course. It is a con -- the greatest, most destructive con of all time, designed to destroy the world's economies by falsely elevating "safety" above all else and persuading the feminized societies of the West to meekly submit to the diktats of petty bureaucrats and arbitrary tyrants.

And remember -- this is only the beginning what they've got planned for all of us. If we're going to fight back, the time is right now.