Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Trump and Abortion



Vincent J. Curtis

30 Mar 2015


Earlier today, Presidential candidate Donald Trump submitted himself to an interview by MSNBC host Chris Matthews.  In the course of the interview, Matthews bored in on Trump’s thinking on abortion, a topic Matthews would never think to raise with Hillary Clinton.

Disregarding the implausibility of it, Matthews asked Trump about a hypothetical anti-abortion law passed by Congress, making abortion illegal.  Matthews asked whether a woman who had had an abortion be punished.  Trump’s simple answer was yes.

The Republican world exploded.  My preferred candidate, Ted Cruz, launched an excoriating rebuttal that ought to embarrass him.  The Fox News panel tonight proved that those hot-house plants have lost all normal human sensibility.  They condemned Trump for his answer and for this demonstration of a lack of political sophistication.  Both Cruz and the Fox News Panel of Hot-House Plants thought that a woman should absolutely not be punished for having an abortion.

These folks are so sophisticated the obvious eludes them.  And they have given no thought to the implications of their answers.

Let us examine more carefully what was said, and that passed very quickly.  The question Matthews put to Trump in the context of that interview was, “should a person who committed a crime be punished?”  The question was otherwise unqualified, and a direct answer to that question therefore would also be unqualified.  Trump’s answer was the dialectical equal to the unqualified question, an unqualified “yes.”

Observe that - like the unqualified question left open - Trump’s answer did not say how.  He only said yes.  Within the universe of how’s that Trump’s “yes” left open was the perpetual psychological torment of knowing that the woman had killed her child.  We know that women can and do suffer from this torment after abortions, save for the psychopaths.  This is one kind of punishment that fits Trump’s yes answer.

It is likely true that Mr. Trump has not thought much about the implications of legislating the matter of abortion, but his instincts are sound enough that when asked whether a person who committed a crime should be punished, he said yes.  He did not give a mealy-mouthed answer to a straightforward question.

We leave it to the law to decide the mens rea of the guilty, the state of their sanity, of their mental fitness to make such a judgment.  These are the details we leave to the experts.  But when a simple, straightforward question is asked and the answer is highly lawyerly, one is right to wonder about the truthfulness of what one is hearing.  (see Clinton, Hillary; and Clinton, Bill)

I don’t think that Trump should be wounded by his answer.  He said what he thought.  It is not a wrong answer; it is a perfectly defensible answer.  The politically correct noises made by Ted Cruz and the Fox News Panel signify nothing but a defensive cover-up.  Both Cruz and the Panel said that, of course, the woman should not be punished, but neither said why a person who committed a crime should not be punished, or what makes the particular crime of killing your baby absolutely legally excusable.

We will see next week what effect, if any, Trump’s straightforwardness on the issue of abortion has on the Wisconsin primary, and whether the mealimouthedness of Ted Cruz’s condemnation starts people to wondering about him.
-30-




Monday, March 28, 2016

The Political Biases hidden in an AP news story

Vincent J. Curtis

28 Mar 2016

An news article written by Lorne Cook and Raf Casert of the Associated Press was published under the headline, “Hundreds of ‘hooligans’ trample Brussels shrine for terror victims.” in today’s Hamilton Spectator.

A few observations about the piece: the writers put all the lies into quotes, as I will explain.

The word ‘hooligan’ was used to describe the bad people in question, a word I normally associate with the Soviet Union or Russia who use it to describe people who cause trouble for the regime.  The word was used in quotes and attributed to Brussels’s Police Commissioner Christian De Coninck.

The AP did not use the word “hooligans” to describe those people who shut down Donald Trump’s rally in Chicago, Ill, the other week, nor did they describe them as “left-wing” or “progressive supporters of Bernie Sanders” or even as “Democrat supporters.”  They were described as “protesters,” a more noble term than” hooligan.”  Or earlier, the rioters in Ferguson, Mo, were not described as ‘hooligans’ or the “Black Lives Matter” movement or the anti-Wall Street protesters.  Funny how the AP can be selective in its choice of descriptors for people it condemns and those it does not.  That selectiveness reveals a left-wing bias.  (I'm shocked!!)

A very precise number, 340, was employed to describe the size of the crowd, not “about 350” not “between 300 and 400”, but precisely 340.   The article did not explain how the police come to this precise number.

Again, in quotes, it was said that the bad people were “right-wing”, “doing the Nazi salute,” and attributing the declaration, “death to Arabs” as a “right-wing idea.”   The photograph accompanying the article shows the protesters doing a clenched fist, right arm salute, which was characteristic of the left-wing Republican anti-fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War.  This wasn’t a Nazi salute, this was the anti-fascist salute!   Moreover, the Nazis and the Muslims admired each other because of their mutual hatred of the Jews.  To claim that the Nazis and Muslims were at each others’ throats would indicate a fissure on the “right,” which makes Islam a right-wing movement, doesn’t it?  And ipso facto evil, doesn’t it?  Oops!  Keeping this left and right thing straight can be confusing.

Early on in the piece, the Police Commissioner was quoted as saying that the 340 were “football hooligans,” and by the end of the piece the hooligans became “right-wing.”  Now, by what process did the AP transform dedicated soccer fans into right-wing ideologues?  Actually, the process was by changing the person quoted, leaving enough distance between the two that the inattentive reader would not notice the slight-of-hand.

“Death to Arabs” is not a right-wing idea.  If anything, judging by results, it is an Arab idea.  The right-wing idea is that Muslims and Arabs should live in their house, and western Europe will live in it’s house.  Muslims live in dar-al-Islam, and the Europeans will be left alone in dar-al-harb. 

Unfortunately, left-wing Europe is trying to get Europe to commit cultural suicide by admitting millions of Muslims to western Europe and letting them live on the public dole until, by out-breeding the Europeans,  Europe will come to live under Sharia law, western civilization will come to an end, and the sins of Europe’s past will be expiated.  This is the tendency that the right-wing football hooligans were protesting.

Since cultural survival runs counter to the left-wing European desire to commit cultural suicide, the AP slanted the story such that the last sparks of European identity were viewed as an evil deserving to be stamped out.  That is the larger narrative being served by the AP story.

The devil is in the details, and in the details of the story the biases of the AP are manifest.

When you start asking, “how do they know this?” you being the realize how much of a news story carries made-up crap.
-30-


Friday, March 25, 2016

A Carbon Tax? Why Not Tax Oxygen Instead?

Is the Canadian Right Losing its Mind?

Vincent J. Curtis

25 Mar 2016

With the fall of the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, Canada’s punditry, which is Liberal-left in orientation, is pointing with glee at what they perceive as the repudiation of the policies of Stephen Harper by his successors.

Some are even floating the notion that the so-called “right” is moving leftward, i.e. towards the center.  Becoming less offensively right wing, in other words.  Coming to see the light of the left, in other words.  On their own terms, there is some superficial evidence to support their contention.

Let’s set aside for the moment the philosophical issues associated with left and right, progressive and conservative, and the issue of a scale of measurement itself changing.  A primary piece of evidence for the contention that “the right” is moving “left” lies in the noises being made by the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party and a few in the federal Conservative party favorable to a carbon tax.

Permit me to caution those gleeful pundits in the press about a tax on “carbon.”  There is a lot of carbon in newsprint and in ink.

Behind any tax on “carbon” lies a belief in the superstition of climate change, or global warming.  The idea is that taxing “carbon” consumption, i.e. in the use of coal and petroleum fuels, is a way of addressing climate change.  By taxing the use of carbon, people will use less of it and thereby reduce the production of carbon dioxide.

The theory of the carbon tax is similar to that of taxing tobacco.  Tobacco is an evil, and taxes on the consumption of tobacco appeals both to the puritan and to the progressive scold, though for different reasons.  The puritan wants to suppress evil for its own sake; the progressive wants it because it advances his political agenda and to suppress political opposition.

It does appear that Patrick Brown, the new Progressive Conservative leader of the Ontario PCs, is warming to a carbon tax.  He says that a carbon tax should be “revenue neutral,” meaning that what new revenue is reaped by the new tax should be met with reduction in taxes in other spheres of collection.  That position is a careful straddle.  He calls attention to the tax-grab aspect of the proposal without confronting the global warming aspect behind the proposal.

The Ontario and Federal Liberal governments want taxes on carbon to raise revenue that they need to help balance their budgets.  A secondary reason for taxing carbon, as opposed to, say, taxing oxygen, which also is necessary for the production of carbon dioxide, is that it plays into the current progressive fashion of global warming caused by those evil western economies bringing about the doom of the world.  The Liberals can bask in the glow of admiration from other progressives.

If you propose a tax on carbon you implicitly endorse the global warming hypothesis.  No conservative appears clever enough to sarcastically propose a tax on oxygen instead, as a way of pointing out the absurdity of the reasoning behind a tax on carbon.  By proposing a tax on oxygen, conservatives draw the debate into the merits of taxing carbon versus oxygen, and by extension call into question the merits of the case for global warming.  They will force into the open the weaknesses of the case for global warming.

Anyhow, when so-called conservatives surrender to progressives on the matter of global warming, they cease being conservative.  The person has moved on the scale; it is not the scale that has moved.  Belief in global warming is not a conservative position.  Skepticism of global warming is the conservative position.  Howling laughter is the conservative response to pious asservations of global warming and climate change.

As time rolls on, the forecasts of global disaster will go past their “sell by” date, and eventually the world will discard global warming as it discarded communism.  Conservatives defeated communism not by adopting the communist program, but by remaining skeptical and pointing out its weaknesses and failures.  Eventually, communism collapsed because it was defied and because the weaknesses and failures were real.

The cause of global warming will be defeated in the same way.  The cause of global warming will be overtaken by some other progressive red herring, and global warming will become yesterday’s cause.

Tax oxygen 16 and leave the carbon 12 alone!  It's more progressive!!
-30-




Sunday, March 20, 2016

George Will is Going Senile



Vincent J. Curtis

20 March 2016


Syndicated columnist George Will has had hardly an unpublished thought in forty years.  He was once considered a very thoughtful, articulate, and sound conservative voice in the realm of punditry.  Lately, however, he has given plenty of evidence that his powers of reasoning are evaporating, and has espoused positions that, frankly, are not up to standard.

Today, Will had published in National Review Online an opinion piece in which was headlined, “The GOP’s Blocking of Supreme Court Pick is Indefensible.”  Now, a man should not be hanged for a headline that someone else likely wrote, but the gist of the headline is valid.  Will argues in the piece that the Republicans should hold hearings on the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland for a seat on the Supreme Court.

Let us dispose of the “indefensible” claim.  Will spends many words breaking down the defenses against holding hearings at all.  The “Biden Rule” is a complete and untouchable defense against holding hearings.  The perfection of the Biden Rule as a defense against holding hearings is why the Obama Administration is talking about everything but the Biden Rule.  They have no refutation of the Biden Rule.  Somehow, the perfection of the Biden Rule against holding hearings eludes the diminishing awareness of the declining Mr. Will.  What is sauce for the goose being also sauce for the gander escapes Mr. Will’s current powers.  The conclusiveness of fighting fire with fire, and of reaping what you sow eludes him.

If the perfection of the Biden Rule as a defense were insufficient, behind it lies the Obama contention.  The Obama contention is that a Senator should filibuster a perfectly qualified candidate like Sam Alito just because he doesn’t like him, or like his politics, or like the politics of he who nominated him, or for personal political advantage having nothing to do with the nominee himself.  The point that what is sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander etc. eludes Mr. Will, who seems to recognize it but fails to grasp its power.

On this morning’s Fox News Sunday, Dr. Ben Carson was asked about his endorsement of Donald Trump, and in the course of his explanation Dr. Carson remarked that politics needed to be played like a game of chess, not of checkers.  George Will, in respect of the Garland nomination, plays politics like checkers, thinking only one move ahead.  Suppose the Senate Republicans did entertain the nomination, went through the process, and in the end rejected the nomination.  What would Obama do?  Why, nominate another!  And all the while lashing the Republicans for their perfidiousness.

In the meantime, Will misses the point of the Trump and Cruz phenomenon.  The Republican base is sick and tired of Republicans promising in the election and collapsing in Washington.  The point of the 2014 election, in which Republicans took the Senate and gained a bigger majority in the House, was to stop Obama.  To date they have singularly failed to do so, and the budget deal of December 2015 just about put the last nail in the coffin.  If Republicans so much as look like they are caving again – and moving the Garland nomination forward would look like it – the fate of the Republicans other than on the presidential race would look dim.

Speaking of Trump, Will displays utter snobbishness in respect of this interloper.  Today, on Fox News Sunday, Will said that he would vote for a third party rather than Trump in November.  He complained about how the conservative party would no longer exist in the Republicans, as if the takeover of the Republican party by the conservative movement in the wake of the Goldwater nomination were legitimate and its supersession, not.

With his diminished powers, Will fails to see that Trump has deftly avoided the trap set by Saul D. Alinsky for the enemies of progressivism, that of freezing, identifying, labelling, and destroying a target.  That Trump avoids been frozen and labelled by his rhetorical methods is what upsets Will, who wants to see a faithful conservative, frozen, labelled, and ripe for destruction.

Unlike the eggheads at National Review, I get Trump.  I get that he is a driving businessman who has been successful by his lights.  In his forty years of business he has acquired a skill set that he wants to apply to the problems of America, to make American great again.  What’s past is past, and this pragmatic man wants to tackle the problems of America as the last major thing he does in his life.  Mitt Romney was the same way, but he let himself be frozen, labelled, and destroyed with lies.  Trump isn’t making that same mistake.

The obvious rapport that Trump has with his audiences ought to be a clue Will and National Review that he is the man who can beat Hillary.  Trump can fight just as dirty as she can, and win.  Trump, unlike Obama, is too much the New Yorker, too much an American to subvert the constitution as Obama has.  He will have to work with the Congress to get his intentions fleshed out in legislation.  Trump, in the first couple of years, will able to marshal the political support necessary to get rid of the progressivism that is holding America back.  Hillary’s presidency, because of her many crimes and those of her husband, with a Republican Congress will be doomed to failure from day one.  Trump will have a mandate to get something done that undoes the Obama legacy.

Democrats count on a George W. Bush presidency: a man who has so much respect for the office he won’t stoop to ravage his political enemies, as Obama does routinely.  Trump is the Republican antidote to Obama, and a heaping dose of their own medicine is what the Democrats, and the American body politic, need in order to bring the tribal extremism in Washington to a close.  All of this, Will misses.  A sad state of affairs for a once-great mind.
-30-


Saturday, March 19, 2016

Judges are Accessories to the Crime.

Vincent J. Curtis

18 Mar 2016

A man named A.B. went to court to get an exemption so that he could be legally killed by lethal injection in a procedure known as "assisted suicide."  The judge granted the request and A.B. was put to death the very next day, i.e. 18 Mar 2016.  The Spectator reported on the request and gave more details than was healthy for the procedure, and no doubt A.B. took full advantage of the decision immediately so that no one would try to put a stop to it.

The lies necessary to make "assisted" suicide sound innocuous are detailed below.  My opinion is that society should not give its blessing to suicide, assisted or otherwise.  If a person wants to off himself, then he should off himself and not try to smear society with the guilt of the killing.



The lies and the moral incoherence of so-called “assisted suicide” were much in evidence in the story,

The first lie is calling it “suicide.”  The description of the procedure shows that suicide is not what is occurring; the person is put to death by a drug injection by the executioner.

The second lie is that the death is going to be ruled “death by disease” rather than as suicide or murder, so as not to disturb the coroner.

The third bit of weirdness is that the applicant asked for an “exemption from the criminal code.”  I know of no legal authority that grants judges the dispensing power, and I submit that in exercising this pretend authority, a decision favorable to the applicant makes the judge accessory to the crime.

Fourth, the conditions of the sufferer being “mentally competent, in extreme pain, and making the assisted-death request without coercion or manipulation” are conditions that contradict each other.  How can a person in extreme pain be said to request assisted-death without coercion?  Extreme pain is the coercion!  The “extreme pain” renders the condition of being “mentally competent” to make such a decision not so!

If a person wants to end their own suffering, why do they ask for blessing of society?  If a person wants to off himself to end his suffering, give him a revolver.  Now, how do you think the criminal justice system would react to suicide by revolver?
-30-


The Legal Profession and Assisted Suicide

Vincent J. Curtis

15 Mar 2016

The inimitable Hamilton Spectator has been on an assisted suicide kick.  The Spectator seems to think it is a grand idea.  The Spec exhibits no understanding of the moral quagmire introduced when the Supreme Court said that a human being had a right under the Charter to assisted suicide.

The lies behind the innocuous sounding premise are plentiful in order to keep it sounding innocuous.  For example, the procedure under which "assisted" suicide takes place is identical to the procedure by which a condemned prisoner is executed.  There is nothing "assisted" about it, somebody puts the person to death by lethal injection.

Catholic institutions have moral objections to this, and want an exemption written into the law so that there is no question about the rights of moral objectors to refuse to do the procedure.

Well!  You would think that Catholic institutions were trying to deny a gay couple a wedding cake or something.  The Spec went into full bombast mode about how religion should not trump the law of all things.  Such a depth of ignorance deserved a response, and it is below.


When the Spectator complains that religious beliefs should not trump the law, it argues incoherently.  The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is not a list of suggestions for lawmakers.  The Charter is the law of the Land which legislators may not transgress in the ordinary course of their lawmaking.

Section 2 (a) of the Charter is where one finds freedom of religion as a fundamental right.  (In case the Spectator has trouble finding it, freedom of the press is listed in Section 2 (b)).  Thus religious considerations are a component of the law and are not a trump of it, except in cases of unconstitutional legislation.

The point of a Catholic hospital seeking a specific exemption in a law of assisted suicide is to help lawmakers avoid doing something stupid.  Without a specific exemption in the suicide legislation, stupid or uniformed people might think that by mere legislation a Catholic institution can be co-opted into becoming Murder Inc. on behalf of the government.  An obvious and unnecessary lawsuit would be avoided if the lawmakers were to make a simple recognition of the facts of the Charter in the suicide legislation.

The Spectator’s incoherent argument does not end there.  The Spectator calls for financial sanctions against Catholic hospitals and against doctors of conscience if they refuse to join the government’s Murder Inc.  It is one thing not to pay a hospital for services it does not perform; but why fail to pay for services it does perform?  The financial penalty lies refusing the business, but to fail to pay a hospital for doing a heart surgery because it does not also do suicide cannot be justified.  Let those who do the business get rich.

Behind all this is a thoughtless arrogance of the legal profession.  A doctor educated himself on his own dime and is likely involved in what is known as “private practice.”  He is not beholden to the government.  But the legal professionals on the Supreme Court, in parliament, and in the Justice Department seem to think they can order the medical profession to join Murder Inc. or face legal sanction.

If the Hippocratic Oath means anything to the medical profession, when faced with the suicide law they ought to down tools and tell the lawyers to do the killing themselves.
-30-





Friday, March 4, 2016

The Boumediene Decision: SCOTUS Uncorks a Stinker

Vincent J. Curtis                                                                            19 June 08


My piece on Donald Trump and War Crimes reminded me of this piece I wrote for the Buffalo News that was published in June, 2008.  It captures the sheer foolishness and self-importance of some the legal profession of the United States.  Justice Scalia made a brilliant descent, and his recent death also adds to the relevance of the piece.


On my return flight from Gitmo, I chanced to sit next to one of the “Habeas” lawyers, civilian lawyers who work pro-bono for the detainees.  With hours to kill and no other on-board entertainment, I struck up a conversation with him.  I wanted to understand why an American lawyer would work so hard on behalf of the enemy.

He didn’t want to talk to me at first, perceiving that I was a member of the media.  I pointed out that my tape recorder, pen, and notepad were packed away; that I hadn’t asked him his name, and that I just wanted to understand him.  He relented, and we discussed matters for over an hour before the conversation finally petered out.

By the end, I understood why he did not want to be identified or quoted.  In over an hour of conversation of trying to understand his motivation, he never once said, “Because I want justice for my client.”   He spent a lot of time arguing unfairness of process.  Now, process is not the same thing as justice, and for a while I thought that this lawyer was perhaps too fixated with the minutia of his profession and was missing the bigger picture.  By the end of the conversation, I believed that his motivation was two-fold: to strike a blow against the Bush Administration, and another for the interests of the legal profession.  The war on terrorism is a matter of major public policy, and the legal profession has been largely shut out of it.  That was his “big picture.”

In his dissent, Chief  Justice Roberts made these same points.

The Boumediene decision is the recent Supreme Court ruling that extended to the detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the constitutional right to Habeas Corpus.  As a result of this decision, Osama bin Laden, if captured alive, now has the right to challenge his detention before a U.S. court as if he were an American citizen.  And the U.S. court has the authority under this decision to order his conditional release if it decides that he was unlawfully detained by the Bush Administration.  (The Boumediene decision failed to say how OBL’s conditional release would be handled administratively, or where he would go.  Like the other detainees, he would possess no passport, no money, and no place of residence.  Details like these are among the reasons why Justice Scalia, in his dissent, argued the case should be ruled ultra vires, that is, beyond the powers of the Court.)

            Except for that one provision denying detainees access to Habeas Corpus in the Military Commissions Act, 2006, the decision leaves intact all the provisions thought to provide the equivalent of Habeas that are contained in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2004.  The DTA was passed by Congress to address the concerns the Supreme Court expressed in its Rashul decision, and the DTA established the Combatant Status Review Tribunal and the Annual Review Tribunal which act as a Habeas equivalent, or so the Congress and the Administration thought.  On account of this, in his dissent, Chief Justice Roberts described the decision as a constitutional bait-and-switch.

            Captain Ted Fessel, USN, the Forward Director of the Office of Administrative Review of Detained Enemy Combatants, described these tribunals.  The CSRT and ART are administrative tribunals with legal underpinnings.  They are staffed by senior ranking military officers, one of whom is a military judge.  They are administrative, and therefore not adversarial.  No lawyers are allowed, except for the judge.  The job of the tribunal is to review all the evidence which justifies the continued detention of the individual under review, determine whether the individual continues to represent a military threat, and whether the individual possesses military intelligence of future value.

            If the detention of the individual can no longer be justified, his case is forwarded to the Pentagon where a Deputy Secretary of Defense renders a final decision on continued detention or release.  Under this process, over 500 detainees were released and another 60 or so are stuck in Gitmo because no country wants to accept them.  Only about 280 continue to be held as detainees, and of these about 80 will be charged with war crimes.

            In a Habeas hearing, the judge will hear nothing more or less than what the CRST/ART tribunals heard.  The judge would undoubtedly lack the military experience with which to assess the probity of the information before him, and he will have equally inexperienced lawyers before him arguing process.  If the judgment favors the plaintiff, that is if the decision runs contrary to that of the military tribunals, it would undoubtedly be on the grounds of process: the inadequacy, insufficiency, lack of probity of the material, and absence of witnesses.  Every release would stand as a condemnation of the Bush Administration; while every denial would testify to the uselessness of the Boumediene decision.

            The decision leaves in place the CSRT/ART process.  A Habeas hearing in civilian courts could to be in addition to those established by the DTA.  The Supreme Court blew up a port-a-potty and is leaving it to others to clean up the mess.

            In his dissent, Chief Justice Roberts pointed out that the detainees did not benefit from the decision, but lawyers did.  He wrote: “So who has won?  Not the detainees.  The Court’s analysis leaves them with only the prospect for further litigation to determine the content of their new habeas right, followed by further litigation to resolve their particular cases, followed by further litigation before the D.C. Circuit – where they could have started had they invoked the DTA procedure.”  The legal profession won because lawyers seized control of the release process and made it a matter of intense political interest.

            Justice Scalia, in his dissent, drew attention to the wider implications of the decision.  He wrote; “What drives today’s decision is….an inflated notion of judicial supremacy.”  Mocking the majority’s concern that “it would be possible for the political branches to govern without legal restraint,” he wrote, “[T]o put it more impartially, areas in which the legal determinations of the other branches will be (shudder!) supreme.”  Reversing the settled precedent of Eisentrager, this decision serves as precedent that nothing is ultra vires of the Supreme Court and that the Court now claims extra-territorial jurisdiction.  Aliens abroad have a right to ask the Supreme Court intervene on their behalf, and serves as precedent for claims to other constitutional rights.  “It sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner.  The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today.  I dissent.”
                                                                        -XXX-


Donald Trump and War Crimes


Vincent J. Curtis

4 March 2016

This talk about how Trump would order the US military to commit war crimes is all crazy.  These alleged lawyers hold too high an opinion of their profession, and they suffer from a short memory.



By the standards of these lawyer experts, John McCain is a war criminal.  By their reckoning, the US committed war crimes against North Vietnam because the US and its pilots bombed that country; undoubtedly some civilians died, and there was no formal state of war between North Vietnam and the US.  They sound like Hanoi Jane.  They take the same position as the North Vietnamese.



The US dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki where hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed, and this too would have to be classed as a war crime, by their reckoning, because innocents were killed.



Terrorist are not protected by the laws of war.  If they get killed by the US military, that’s just their bad luck!  They are not lawful combatants.  As for their families, well these terrorists not only threaten US military personnel in their homes, they have threated the families of these personnel.  Well, if you want to play that game, the US can play it too.

I don’t see under what law US military personnel can be accused of war crimes if they attack terrorist organizations root and branch.  We have Omar Khadr, who as a 15 year old, was just accompanying his father in Afghanistan.  Then, he threw a grenade that killed Sgt Christopher J. Speer, a medic who was trying to help him.  Too late for Speer to recognize Khadr as a terrorist "combatant." (which, by the standards of the Geneva Convention neither young Khadr nor his father lawfully were.)



Their “families” are, in terms of the Geneva Convention, being used as hostages or human shields.  The death of these folks lies on the conscience of the terrorists, for they are the ones who lay down the rules of the conflict.  ISIS calls for Muslims in the US to kill military personnel, their families, and other innocent people.  Too bad if the US can play their game better than they can.



War is ugly.  And cheeseparing by lawyers, inflated with the importance of their profession, doesn’t make it any more civilized.



What Trump is saying is that if you fight the US, be prepared for a brass-knuckles brawler.  The lawyers who say they care about the security of America would do well to just shut the hell up.

-30-

Climate Change and Mental Health

Vincent J. Curtis

29 Feb 16

My favorite hometown newspaper runs a website.  An article appeared on it that originated with the Toronto Star, and was one of those intellectually lazy efforts that connect something bad with global warming, or climate change.  Little effort is made to make the far-fetched connection "near-fetched". (to borrow an invention of deceased comedian George Carlin.)  Any effort to do so will demonstrate the large holes in the argument.  The piece was headlined on the effect of climate change on our collective mental health.

I saw this piece before it hit the print edition, and immediately sent this missive.  I did not find it later in the print edition, so perhaps this rejoinder caused the editors to pull the piece - its foolishness having been made manifest, even to them.
 

A while ago the Spectator published a short piece of mine in which I said that anyone who speaks seriously of climate change is either a fool or has no respect for the intelligence of his interlocutor.  The story at reference is yet another case in point.

The purport of the story is that we have to ruin advanced, western economies because people like Dr. David Ouchterlony are suffering depression from global warming, or more particularly from its mere prospect.

The headline of the story suggests that the connection between deteriorating mental health and climate change has been made by more than one expert.  However, after reading the story I found no one who was an expert both on climate change and on psychiatry, and expertise in both disciplines is necessary to make an “expert” connection between climate change and mental health.   Never mind two or more, not one was offered.  The connection was, and is, far-fetched.

How can anything this ridiculous be offered as a serious news story?  Where was Dr. Ouchterlony when the world was at real risk of thermonuclear war between 1962 and 1991?  Did he tell the Soviet embassy that they should stand down their nuclear forces because he was suffering headaches?

People who worry about climate change should take a Valium, and I will see them in the morning.
-30-



Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Four Scientists Fear-Monger

Vincent J. Curtis

1 March 16

As Hamilton hunkers down before a snow storm, a storm of a slightly different kind broke over the editorial pages of my favorite hometown newspaper.  It carried an Op-ed today headlined, "Scientists' open letter on the dangers of biosolids."

The four scientists were: independent scientist Sierra Rayne, Ph.D.; senior science and policy adviser for the David Suzuki Institute John Werring, M.Sc., RPBio; the executive director of The Precautionary Group Richard Honour, Ph.D.; and Louise Brown Professor of Neuroscience with the depart of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia Steven R. Vincent, Ph.D.

The open letter amounts to a bit of fear-mongering combined with a recommendation.  The fear-mongering concerns the "inconceivably large" "complexity" in biosolid waste that is typically landfilled by municipalities.  In short, the four are offering fear of the unknown as reason to accept their recommendation.  By "unknown" they mean things that they do not know, and don't believe anyone else does either; and the fact that the evils they speculate about have not been observed yet acts as no brake upon their speculations.

The enemy they concoct is "Big Sludge," which, so far as I can tell, are municipalities looking to sell solid waste to a willing buyer.

A few quotes from the letter: "The current and future problem is inconceivably large, particularly since the human population is producing sewage sludge at a rapidly growing rate."

"Immediately halt the land disposal of sewage sludge as a starting point, and begin either stockpiling or landfilling the material in secure locations with full leachate systems until a more responsible means of dealing with the problem is implemented."

"We also see municipalities and regional districts talking about the revenue from selling their sludge for land disposal, but are they telling the taxpayers they are supposed to represent about the very large potential risks from the knowing and willful contamination of lands, waters, and the atmosphere that arises from these choices?"

"Increased health care costs, decreased property values and toxic tort lawsuits have collective liabilities to Big Sludge over time that far outweigh the relatively small cash flows current coming into the public purse.  Governments are playing Russian roulette with sewage sludge.  Over time, there is a high probability that game will be lost at the public's expense."

A few points, the fact that the human populations of India and China are gaining proper waste disposal and water treatment facilities should be considered a good thing, but the fact that they are in no way impacts the amount of sewage sludge that we in Hamilton and we in Canada produce.  Thus quote 1 is disposed of.  Point 2 is covered in the material below.  The four scientists should have consulted a lawyer about points 3 and 4 because in Canada governments are generally immune from class torts, particularly if best known practices are employed by the municipality.  What would be the point of the citizens of Hamilton collectively suing the City of Hamilton?  If the citizens won, their government would, for example, go bankrupt and then the citizens would have to bail it out.  Stupid.

As I said, a lot of fearmongering.  My reply to the credentialed is below:  

The four scientist who raised concerns about the disposal of biosolids believe that storing these solids in a concentrated form is safer than storing them in diluted form, as they currently are in solid waste disposal sites.  They say that storage in concentrated form should be done until, “a more responsible means of dealing with the problem is implemented.”

The means of dealing with the problem is known.  The ultimate destruction of organic material is achieved by incineration.  If held long enough at high enough temperatures, even the toughest organic molecule will be reduced to carbon dioxide and other simple molecules.  A technology of that sort that was supposed to be built in Hamilton, but has been harassed into near oblivion by environmentalist worries.

The environmentalist movement, which the four scientists represent, is insufficiently organized to make decisions about what it will and will not accept.  There is always a purer strain of environmentalism that will say no to a proposed solution.  No organization in the movement looks at the big picture and can speak authoritatively on its behalf.

The result is that one wing of the movement raises an issue the solution to which another wing rejects.  And the public is left baffled and unsatisfied as to the right thing to do.
-30-