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Canadian Citizens' "Covid" Enquiry Final Report

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Category: Covid
Hits: 529

2024-04-02

We have all been following the UK Covid Enquiry under Baroness Hallett to some extent, to determine how well or otherwise she will dig down to the matters that concern the population.

The good Baroness has a long and distinguished history of being appointed to chairing enquiries into matters of national significance.

Today we have news of a contrasting type of investigation that was conducted in Canada by what one assumes to be a self-organising collective of people throughout Canada, who set up a National Citizens Inquiry to look into the handling of the Covid event in that country. 

It will be fascinating to compare the output (when the UK enquiry finally completes ... ) of these two approaches.

Meanwhile, you can read the Final Report of the Canadian people's effort.

Watch the four minute summary on X.

There's a lot to unpack here - including a memo outlining alleged political shenanigans by politicians to secure control over the inquiry in the future ... it seems that the powers that shouldn't be maybe don't like independent thought any more, given that elections may be in the offing that they assume they will win.

Still, the Inquiry to date does seem to have been run on apolitical lines.

Worth a good look.

(10 minutes)

 

ncicanada on Rumble

 

It's Our Call, and Nobody Else's

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Category: Free Citizen
Hits: 1068

2024-04-02

I gave up being a religious person a long time ago. "Spiritual" and "Religious" are words with variable meanings depending on your life experience - how are they to be interpreted?

Why is the notion of "sacred" religiously excluded from all "science"?

If science means anything it means "to know" ... to know the truth about how the universe in which we find ourselves, the universe of which we ourselves are very much a part, how this universe actually works - and if matters sacred exist here at all, then an understanding of "sacred" is surely an intrinsic part of the "science"?

Do such questions have answers? If so, where are they to be found?

I don't always relate to "Stop World Control" because I normally find him too hectoring, too "in your face", maybe a bit too "melodramatic" to be persuasive, but at the same time I don't doubt his authenticity or his motivation - these are times to try men's our souls and we all react differently.

But whatever your religious or spiritual inclination, I suspect that the point he is flagging up this Easter is likely pertinent to us all, even if delivered from a Christian (ie: follower of Christ's example) perspective.

After all is said and done, each of us has been given a magnificent organ between our ears by our creator (whoever/whatever you believe Him/Her/It to be) and it would be the very height of discourtesy to duck out of using it to its fullest extent - it is our duty and responsibility to think for ourselves and to act accordingly, and not merely to follow and obey those who declaim the loudest.

We are called to seek out, verify and weigh the evidence, apply the logic, assess alternative viewpoints, and yes, in humility listen to that still small inner voice of intuition that can help us determine what feels right in those cases that still defy confident assessment.

It's truly a tough call these days, given that almost anything except flesh and blood face-to-face interaction can be (and is!) faked, but we are where we are and we must make the best of it.

It's our call, and nobody else's.

 

Is Your Council Free Speech Compliant?

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Category: Free Citizen
Hits: 1054

2024-04-01

Free speech used to be taken for granted, thanks in large part to sensible legal precedents set by sensible judges in times past, who opined that the right to speak only without offending was not worth having. Now a quick internet search for "the right to speak only without offending was not worth having" pulls up a myriad of articles about how to speak without causing offence, but none about the status quo ante, so far has the needle been pushed away from previous precedent.

And yet, whilst offence may or may not be "offered", it doesn't instantiate unless "taken" - and these days it doesn't even have to be offered to be taken, it can be taken anyway. Therefore in principle, the party that "gives" offence isn't able to judge whether or not "offence" will be taken. One can guess, but one cannot be reasonably sure either way.

Laws based on such a subjective definition of the alleged "offence" (in its legal sense of falling outside legal/lawful behaviour) are not ideal. In practice it simply brings the law into disrepute.

Of course there are well-established legal limits to speech - one may not slander anybody (ie: defame verbally by telling fibs) - that may also offend but the offence of slander is already a civil matter that can be settled for damages in the Civil Courts. One may not incite criminal activity or civil unrest, and whilst in some cases there may be a narrow dividing line between civil protest and civil unrest, unrest and protest have never been equated in law.

So it comes to pass that numerous guidelines have to be written by numerous organisations simply in order for members of those organisations to stay out of trouble for speaking one's mind. 

Personally, I would opt for the status quo ante: that free speech is far more important than the notion that somebody might take offence, and in a free society people should be robust enough to take any minor but legal offence on the chin and move on - after all, if slander is committed you can take them to court for damages, but if no criminal activity is incited you are never obliged to take offence, better to put it down to experience and get on with your life.

Remember the law works both ways - if you can take offence at the speech of others, others can also take offence against yours ...

"Many months of work alongside the Free Speech Union have gone into getting this policy right, and this is only the beginning – the many years of local authorities getting free speech wrong need to be put right"

And finally, guidelines cost money, unnecessarily complex guidelines cost excessive amounts of time and money to write and to administer, and we wonder why our standard of living is going down the drain whilst everybody is investigating what in times past never needed to be policed and investigated.

 

Wireless Roll-Out Woes

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Category: Free Citizen
Hits: 1277

2024-03-30

Richard Vobes in an earlier video investigated some seemingly dubious wireless masts with Ian Jarvis.

Now Colchester Council Watch brings us news of not dissimilar goings-on in Gloucester, where activists have been taking their council to task for lack of public consultation, not to mention "malfeasance in public office" ...

(41 minutes)

 

Like / Dislike this video here.

 

Down with those Dreadful Populists!

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Category: Free Citizen
Hits: 1057

2024-03-29

The EU is notoriously dismissive of its populist parties, and the UK is well out of it (at least legally out of it - politically it is obviously still a work in progress, that some suspect may outlast the EU itself).

I suppose that the British have a bit of a reputation for independent thinking - although not always right-thinking. I suppose that our struggle for independence (ie: getting out from under) has been going on ever since the Romans invaded, and for all I know it may even predate those times.

But it is now clear that independence is a multi-layered concept - we regained our legal nationhood from the legal clutches of the EU, but not yet our political independence from their top-down political thinking - that very plainly still has to be resolved, and that resolution is a battle not only for our nationhood but also for fundamental truth and integrity within our governing institutions. We need to recognise and understand who really governs us, and how they do it, before we will be able to wrest back our right to govern ourselves as we see fit.

That is a wholly different struggle from the historical battles that were fought for our "independence" and "freedom" in past ages.

Or is it? Perhaps it is just another battleground of the same struggle, a battleground that in past ages we didn't perceive as clearly as we are beginning perceive it today.

Nick Hubble from Fortune and Freedom reviews the events in Europe that preceded and in some ways set the stage for the English Civil War, which was indeed a battle over how we were to be governed, and has parallels with our modern world. 

Whilst those parallels are indeed apposite, our struggle for truth, integrity, and bottom-up governance is now coming to the fore as never before. And it is being fought, indeed must be fought, on a global scale.

What will success look like?

When we can provide a different answer to that old joke: "How do you know when a politician is lying?" we will know that we have made progress.

 

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