You're joking, right?

 Vincent J. Curtis

17 Apr 24

In its editorial of today, “Carbon tax critics must offer solutions,” the Dog’s Nest Dispatch once again plays the role of radio station DUMB: all talk and never listen.  The editorial proposes that Prime Minister Trudeau invite the premiers to play the mug’s game with him: he’ll meet with them provided they come with “plans” that are “sound, visionary, cost-tested” for combatting “climate change.”  Since these are pre-conditions to any meeting, who gets to decide if said plans are, indeed, “sound, visionary, and cost-tested?” If they are, why meet, just adopt them, and take the credit?

 But the Dispatch’s editorial fails a more basic absurdity test, that being: why bother? Canada contributes 1.5 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions; while China, India, and the rest of Asia contribute over 60 percent, and they have no intention on slowing down their own growth of emissions.  The Dispatch knows, or ought to know, that Canada isn’t the problem and can’t be the solution; Trudeau is caught as a moral poseur, and can’t figure out a graceful way of escaping this trap of his own making.

To think that Canada can do anything about climate change is DUMB: the call letters of the Dog’s Nest Dispatch!

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Houthis

Vincent J. Curtis

7 Feb 24

Hamas opened its war with Israel on October 7, 2023, with a surprise attack that killed over 1,200 people, many of them brutally, and taking another 246 people hostage.  The war did not go well for Hamas, and Israel’s success created a response from an unexpected quarter: Yemen.  In support of the Palestinian cause, the Yemeni Houthis opened a campaign to close the Gulf of Aden, the Straits of Bab Al-Mandeb, and the Red Sea to international shipping.

On December 26, the Houthis fired twelve one-way attack drones, three anti-ship ballistic missiles, and two land attack cruise missiles over a ten-hour period, according to U.S. Central Command.  The U.S. has deployed the U.S.S. Eisenhower carrier group, with two Arleigh Burke class missile cruisers (passim, ad nauseum) into the region to keep the sea lanes open.  The anti-missile weaponry the U.S. possesses include SM-2s (Block 11A-RIM66) (472 cm long, range: 125 nmi., cost: $2.5m), SM-6s (RIM-174) (660 cm long, Range: 230 nmi., cost $4m); the Evolved Sea-Sparrow Missile (ESSM: range 50 nmi, cost: $1m) which is effective against low-flying threats such as anti-ship cruise missiles and drones; as well as CIWSs.

There are four Super-Hornet squadrons on board the Ike, and are equipped with APG-79 electronically scanned array radar, plus Sidewinder air-to-air missiles ($450k) and AMRAAMs ($1m).  The Super-Hornet was first operationally deployed in 2002

On February 2^nd, the Houthis attacked with twelve UAVs, an Uncrewed Surface Vessel (USV), and anti-ship ballistic missiles in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, with minimal effect.

On February 3nd, 2024, the U.S., along with UK RAF Tornado fighter-bombers out of Cyprus, attacked Houthi bases in Yemen, hitting multiple underground storage facilities, command and control centers, missile systems, UAVs, storage and operational sites, radars, and helicopters, according to U.S. CENTCOM.  This strike was connected with Operation PROSPERITY GUARDIAN, which Canada supports diplomatically but without any operational hardware.

The Houthis are a large clan that originated in Yemen’s northwestern Saada province. They are Zaydi, a form of Shiism, making them natural allies of Iran and enemies of Saudi Arabia. Zaydis are a religious minority in Yemen, comprising about a third of its population.

The Houthi movement emerged in northern Yemen in the 1990s out of anger at alleged Saudi financial and religious influence in Yemen. There is a lot of domestic Yemeni politics at play in the Houthi campaign in support of the Palestinian cause.

Abdul Malik al Houthi has been the group’s spiritual, military, and political leader since 2007. Little is known of him, and he’s rarely seen in public. His brother-in-law, Youssef al Midani, is deputy leader. Malik’s two brothers, Yahia and Abdul-Karim, are also senior leaders in the movement.

The Houthis are said promote no coherent ideology, and that their political platform is likewise vague and contradictory. The Houthi originally wanted to imitate Hezbollah, that is, to have power without actually ruling.

The Houthis made themselves a useful ally of Iran in the latter’s effort to destabilize Sunni states in the region: fighting a war with Saudi Arabia starting in 2015 and firing ballistic and cruise missiles of Iranian types into Saudi and, in 2022, at Abu Dhabi.  I say “of an Iranian type” because Iran vociferously denies supplying the Houthis with weapons and training, despite being caught red-handed on several occasions (Tehran calls such claims “false, irresponsible, destructive, and provocative”), and so it must be that these semi-literate tribesmen, without technical sophistication or an industrial base, manage to produce identical copies of their patron’s exotic weapon systems themselves.

Treacherous and bloodthirsty doesn’t being to describe the politics of the region. The Houthis killed ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh, a former ally, on December 4, 2017, in a roadside ambush, after having killed a former top advisor to Saleh the previous August. Iranian officials celebrated Saleh’s death.

Even semi-literate tribesmen have access to sophisticated weaponry, and, but for distance, the CAF and Canada are naked against it and to the barbarism controlling it.

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Who’s the moron?

Vincent J. Curtis

4 Apr 24

RE: Europe is facing a new Dark Age. Op-ed by Simon Bennett, supplied by Troy Media The Hamilton Spectator 4 Apr 24

Simon Bennett, the Director of the Civil Safety and Security Unit at Leicester University, in yet another tedious hit piece on Donald Trump, concedes that the former president isn’t a moron; he’s just an ignoramus.  Bennett raises Trump’s America Frist policy, saying that Trump believes it will deliver peace and prosperity to his Make America Great Again disciples.

“It will not,” says Simon Bennett.

And there it lies, an “it will not”: a bald assertion resting on nothing but the authority of the great Simon Bennet, unsupported by other argument or evidence.

But there is plenty of evidence that Bennett is wrong; it’s found in the four years of Trump’s presidency, which was indeed marked by great and rising prosperity, not just for his “disciples,” but for all America, including, particularly, minorities and women; and by peace in the world.

Putin invaded Ukraine when Obama and Biden were president, but not Trump.  Trump assured Putin that Ukraine would not join NATO, but Trump also supplied Ukraine with lethal aid, which Obama did not; and Trump obliged NATO members to spend $100 billion more annually on defense, and to live up to their 2 percent commitment.

It’s not that Trump-hater Simon Bennett is an ignoramus; it’s that he’s a moron.

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Radio Station DUMB

They gotta have a plan!

Vincent J. Curtis

2 Apr 24

RE: Critics of carbon tax have no plan. Editorial. The Dog's Nest Dispatch 2 Apr 24.

The Dog’s Nest Dispatch resembles a radio station of call letters DUMB: all talk, no listen. The Dispatch has often, and for years, been reminded of Canada’s tiny contribution to world CO2 emissions: 1.5 percent; and of Asia’s: greater than 60 percent, and growing. The Dispatch has also been told repeatedly that the carbon tax, being a tax on an inelastic demand, simply won’t reduce carbon dioxide emissions.  The Dispatch hasn’t admitted the truth of these facts, nor countered them with argument; it simply ignores these facts, and their implications.

Hence, like the bleat from a sheep, we get an editorial complaining that the opposition “doesn’t have a plan!”  Well, Trudeau’s plan isn’t working, but he’s continuing with it anyway: how smart is that?  Canada simply cannot do anything about rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere, plan or not. The political question ought to be “why bother?” and that is indeed the question going through the minds of a large number of Canadians now, and the Dispatch refuses stubbornly to acknowledge it.  Why don’t the geniuses at the Dispatch offer their own “plan” for Canada to halt, by her own efforts, the rising CO2 concentration in the atmosphere?

The more distant its editorial position gets from reality, the fewer people listen to radio station DUMB.

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Addictions

Vincent J. Curtis

1 Apr 24

 

RE: Our banks are addicted to oil. Op-ed by Senator Rosa Galvez. The Hamilton Spectator 1 Apr 24.

Banks are “addicted” to oil? Are newspapers, then, “addicted” to readership? To advertising? To paper?  Aren’t the Canadian public “addicted” to oil inasmuch as modern life would be impossible bur for gasoline, diesel, lubricants, and natural gas?

And what is this climate “crisis” of which Senator Galvez writes? What crisis? What is the empirical evidence of a climate “crisis”?  Southern Ontario enjoys a mild winter, and this is the unmistakeable sign that something bad is happening? We’ve heard about impending climate disasters waiting just around the corner for getting on to forty years now; and by every empirical measure, things are getting better, not calamitously worse.

Senator Galvez evidently has her addiction too, and hers to popular nonsense.  But if, because of their peculiar addictions, the Feds attack one of Alberta’s principal industries and employers, the oil and gas sector; they’re going to create an existential crisis, for Canada.

Why should Alberta stay in confederation when the Federal government is trying to destroy its economy?

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Ignore the facts

Vincent J. Curtis

26 Mar 24

RE: Ignore the optics, the carbon tax works. Op-ed by Taylor C. Noakes, an independent journalist and “public historian.” The Hamilton Spectator 26 Mar 24.

If an article of that title were written by economist Ross McKittrick of the University of Guelph, it would indeed be worth reading.  McKittrick has been writing about carbon taxes since the mid-1990s. But the huffings and puffings of a climate zealot, to the effect of “ignore the facts, listen to what I’m telling you,” is unconvincing.  The absence of hard data doesn’t help the case.

The facts are that Canada’s carbon dioxide emissions peaked in 2007, remained more or less constant from then until the beginning of COVID, when they fell, and are now recovering to former levels.  McKittrick made two pertinent observations about carbon taxes worth noting.  The first is that to properly judge its effect, you have to eliminate all other incentives to reducing carbon emission in order to isolate that one effect. Now, that isn’t going to happen, and hence the author’s claim that the carbon tax works is without analytical foundation.

The other pertinent point is that the carbon tax is on an inelastic demand: people still have to drive to work and heat their homes in winter, and rising costs of fossil fuels required for these activities will be met by reducing expenditures in other areas, such as fewer meals out, buying cheaper food, buying fewer or cheaper clothes.

The carbon tax doesn’t reduce carbon emissions, and zealotry can’t make it so.

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Surreal climate calls

Vincent J. Curtis

18 March 24

RE: Climate woes need solutions, not slogans Editorial, The Hamilton Spectator 18 Mar 24

RE: Let’s all be climate role models. Op-ed by Tricia Clarkson, a climate change columnist & co-chair of Peterborough Alliance for Climate Action

Canada is responsible for 1.5 percent of the global emissions of carbon dioxide. India and China together are responsible for 40 percent.  Include the rest of Asia, and over half of global carbon dioxide emissions are accounted for.

Canada is not the problem; it cannot therefore be part of the solution; and neither Xi of China nor Modi of India look to Canada, or to Prime Minster Trudeau, as a moral example for anything.

Also, there is no climate crisis. The climates of the world aren’t about to collapse, descend into chaos, or fall into any other calamity.  Winters in eastern Canada are becoming milder, and, so the conclusion is: this is wrong, and something bad must be happening!

Nothing bad is happening; the world isn’t about to end; and even if it were, there’s nothing Canada can do about it.  The call for Canadians to suffer economically because the climate of eastern Canada is improving smacks of an absurd  prudishness, a moralistic zealotry, and, given the statistics above, downright surreal.

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