The Anthropocene: A New Geologic Age?

Vincent J. Curtis

22 Aug 2018

RE: The Dawning of a New Age. (The Hamilton Spectator Aug 22, 2018)

Count me skeptical about the dawning of a new geologic age.

Geologic ages are shorthand for referring to periods of time in the remote past that demonstrated characteristics of the planet of importance to geologists.  The current age, the Holocene, refers to the period of time from the “end” of the last ice age to the present – about 12,000 years in length.  There is no uncontroversial way to designate which particular year or moment in time 12,000 years ago that marks the precise moment that the last ice age ended.  The boundaries are not that sharp.  The ice sheets began to retreat over several thousand years, and they are still retreating.

So, what is so special about the creation of a new geologic age beginning in the year 1950?  A glance at the Global Warming hockey stick graph shows 1950 as the year that the shaft turns into the blade.

There is a strong smell of “New Age” politics in the push to declare a new geologic age.  What is the name that paleontologists want to call the new age?  Why, the Anthropocene, even though man has existed for over 400,000 years.

We won’t know for several thousand years hence whether a new geologic age should be proclaimed or not, because it will take that long for the new enduring characteristics of the planet to become observable and significant to the scientists of that era.

The stench of post-modernist politics is too strong to ignore that we should tamely accept as holy writ the alleged dawning of a new geologic age – one characterized by western civilization messing up the planet.

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NATO, NAFTA, and STATECRAFT

Vincent J. Curtis

15 Aug 2018

“Whatever floats your boat” is not an expression heard much these days in the Royal Canadian Navy.  With the paucity of boats that float, it is too demoralizing.  But it wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Not long ago, the Canadian government announced a plan to spend $62 billion to refloat our surface combatant fleet.  Hulls from South Korea, propulsion systems from the UK, armaments from Germany, and an electronic suite from Lockheed-Martin, snap together at an east-coast ship-yard and voilà.  At $4 billion a pop, what could go wrong?

Plenty, apparently.  After the mysterious assessment of a game-misconduct penalty to Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, there doesn’t appear to be anybody in the RCN who knows how to put together a warship.

Luckily, there is a way out.  One that not only will muscularize the RCN but could also buttress Canada’s economy.

If Canada were to purchase a small fleet of, say, six Arleigh Burke class missile destroyers from the United States, at US$2 billion each for a total of CDN$15 billion, it would, in the first place, go a long way towards meeting Canada’s NATO commitment of spending two percent of GDP on defense.  The acquisition would double the tonnage, increase the speed, and dramatically increase the fighting power of the RCN.

Fifteen billion dollars is not chump change, even in northern pesos.  A very public and unexpected commitment by Canada to buy American in this instance could be made to go a long way in the really important matter of preserving our trillion dollar trade relationship with the United States.

Dealing Trump some wins isn’t going to hurt our cause.  Trump can claim a win at getting another NATO country to spend more on defense.  (Okay, we’re already committed to it, so it isn’t really “more” and “new,” but the American public doesn’t know that.)  Trump gets another win for that NATO country buying American, a kind of confirmation that America makes the best armaments in the world, as he boasts.  He gets the win for a big and obvious reduction of the “trade deficit” that America allegedly has with those devious and smart Canadians who outwitted American negotiators twenty-five years ago.  That alleged deficit is a very public bone of contention - that can be turned in our favour.

President Trump is not a stupid or ungrateful man.  Despite his invective against China’s trade practices, Trump offered President Xi of China favorable trade terms if he would help out the U.S. with North Korea.  When that help wasn’t forthcoming, China got slapped with tariffs and has a rapidly spreading trade war on its hands; and Trump is determined to dramatically shrink the $500 billion trade deficit that the U.S. has with China.

If we’re smart, we’ll reflect upon what was offered China – concessions on trade in return for help with something else.  For our NATO move, a renewal of the NAFTA agreement on favorable terms is the concession we want, and the new treaty could be spun as a win for Trump also.  We get continued access to US markets.  We get a fleet of faster and more powerful warships than we’ve ever had, at half the expected cost of those gold-plated frigates.  And we’d still have $47 billion left in the surface combatant program.

Since the election of the new Mexican president, Andres Lopez Obrador, bilateral talks on trade began taking place between Mexico and the U.S., while Canada has very publicly been shut out.  Canada had been reluctant to re-negotiate NAFTA in the absence of Mexican representation.  So much for loyalty.

Mexico won’t blend its interests with ours.  Trump wants bilateral trade agreements, and Mexico caved.  We have to look after ourselves, and a bilateral free-trade agreement (and the win for Trump that that entails) wasn’t so bad in 1987.  A noteworthy defense purchase is a big chip we can play.

A big win on trade and for our economy, a bigger, better, faster, stronger navy for a fraction of the original cost – all this for the purchase of a few warships from Trump.  Can Canadian statecraft be devious and smart enough to deal Trump a few wins?

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Maxime Bernier questions multi-culturalism

Vincent J. Curtis

16 Aug 2018

Progressivism and post-modernism have the habit of punching themselves in the face.  The attacks on Maxime Bernier is a case in point.

M. Bernier is what is known as a pure laine Quebecker.  That means he is a person from Quebec who is of French culture, whose first language is French, and who can trace his ancestry to 18^th century Quebec.  He belongs to precisely that kind of minority that is supposed to be protected by post-modernist progressivism from what it finds as the evil English culture.  And yet English-accultured progressives accuse him of being an ungrateful racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic/Islamophobic deplorable for asking what the limits of multi-culturalism are.

Imagine making the same accusations against Jacques Parizeau.  Absurd!

Canada was once an officially bicultural country – French and English.  In the midst of the national unity crises from the 1960s to the 1990s, Pierre Trudeau introduced the notion of “multi-culturalism” as a means of diluting the strength of English culture in Canada and to reassure those of French culture that theirs remained safe inside the Canadian political context.

M. Bernier is an ornament of national unity.  When he asks about the limits of multi-culturalism, he is asking serious questions that go to the heart of what it means to be Canadian, and in particular French-Canadian.  Is one of the two founding cultures of Canada to be reduced to the status of being just another raisin in the raisin pudding?  Is French-Canadian culture itself going to be subject to an assault on its integrity and meaning?  Finally, what is Canadian about unassimilable cultures that exist in Canada?

Unlimited multi-culturalism raises serious questions of state, and M. Bernier is not the first to ask questions of this type.  (e.g. Is France still French if she is multi-cultural?)

He deserves respectful and thoughtful answers, not catcalls.

But catcalls are all progressivism has when it is questioned.

Canada’s national unity problem is only sleeping.  When a fellow like Maxime Bernier asks questions about the limits of multi-culturalism, English-accultured progressives better have good answers lest the slumbering problem awaken.

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Hunter and Malthus

Vincent J. Curtis

9 Aug 2018

Hamilton's small-time academic, Dr. Latham Hunter, professor of "cultural studies and communications," is at it again.  She condemns Ontario's new Premier Doug Ford for betraying her children because he cancelled the cap-and-trade carbon tax regime - fulfilling a campaign promise.  Hunter confesses to saying things to her children that, said by a conservative, would be classed as child abuse by a progressive.  Anyhow, read the piece for the full context of the article below.

RE: Ford’s greatest betrayal of our children

It’s a pity Dr. Latham Hunter didn’t read my submission entitled, “Can Ontario stop global warming?”  She could have saved herself a lot of worry.

Had she read my 1996 piece on the then just concluded Kyoto treaty conference, she might be able to look forward to grandchildren.

However, she has utterly trapped herself in a prison of post-modern progressivism, and refuses to break out of it.

This scientist, over twenty years ago, recognized anthropogenic Global Warming as the post-modernist political farce it was.  Kyoto was that space cadet Al Gore’s baby, and he was into Malthusian catastrophe since the days of Paul Ehrlich and “The Population Bomb” of the 1970s.  This scientist said at the time, based on thermodynamics and elementary logic, that if the earth was getting warmer, then so must the sun.

But since 1998, atmospheric temperature measurements of the earth by satellite have shown no increase.  That twenty year gap in actual warming is why “Global Warming” morphed into climate change.  It’s hard to argue a cause-effect relationship between man’s activity and warming when the effect is not observed even though the cause is present and active.  The earth isn’t going to turn into Venus because of Western civilization.

Hunter should, just for laughs, try reading and refuting the other side of the argument.  Condemning the other side as not worth listening to because they are sexist/racist/homo-trans-Islamophobic and socially conservative leaves the intellectual muscles flaccid, and prevents one from learning something new.

A thought for Hunter:  was this world of sex that she finds so challenging to children created by social conservatives or by progressive post-modernism?  A question:  are you really that indifferent as to whether you have grandchildren, or not?  If you are that indifferent, why do you pretend to care about what will be happening to the earth 80 years from now?  You will be dead, and your children would be in their 90's.

Hunter should have more faith in the Western society that brought us to the high level of success we enjoy, and that is expanding into the third world.  In eighty years, the world will still be here and so will advanced, western civilization.

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Saudi - Canada Dispute Screws up Bigger Islamic Project

Vincent J. curtis

12 Aug 2018

Saudi Arabia joins Iran and Abu Dhabi among Muslim countries with whom Canada has profound diplomatic differences.  The Islamic Republic of Iran has yet to provide a satisfactory accounting of the torture, rape, and murder of Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian citizen of Iranian descent, at the hands of agents of the Iranian state.  Saudi Arabia has imprisoned a woman’s rights activist, Samar Badawi, for activities which the Saudi authorities deem hostile to the regime.  In the latter case, Prime Minster Justin Trudeau describes the Canadian side of the dispute as the application of Canadian values to Saudi Arabia.

Canada’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Chrystia Freeland, tweeted out her support of Saudi women’s rights activists and called upon the Saudi regime for their immediate release.  The Saudi regime reacted strongly, expelling Canada’s ambassador, recalling its own, and ordering its students to leave Canada immediately.  (We can still buy their oil, but they won’t buy our wheat.)

So far as I am concerned, good riddance.  Canada has next to no interest in these and other Middle Eastern countries, and the less we have to do with these brutal regimes, the better.

What is odd is that “Canadian values” are freely applied by Liberals to the internal affairs of Muslim countries but their application by conservatives here in Canada is regarded as abhorrent and certainly as impolite.  It was only last year that Dr. Kellie Leitch was run out of polite society for her campaign for applying “Canadian values” in Canada, particularly in the realm of immigration.  Leitch was condemned as a closet Islamophobe for her effort to stop creeping Sharia supremacism in Canada, and yet the actions of avowedly Sharia law regimes cause grave diplomatic problems with multiple Liberal governments.

Stephen Harper was accused of playing on Islamophobia when he insisted that the swearing the oath of citizenship be done in the Canadian style, i.e. with face uncovered rather than masked in accordance with Sharia law  Both France and Quebec have been condemned as Islamophobic for passing laws against face coverings consistent with French values of laicité. 

When confronted with the realities of Sharia, the liberal mind is appalled; and yet, for votes and for the applause of post-modernist progressives, liberals offer Motion 103 and condemn others who want to protect Canada from Sharia supremacism.

The pulling of Saudi money and Saudi Arabians from Canada is a good thing, and the less Sharia in Canada, the better – however it is achieved.  If the Trudeau Liberals apply Canadian values throughout the rest of the Islamic world, perhaps we will be much less troubled by Sharia supremacism.  We want Sharia law countries to pull their money, their diplomats, their Wahhabi Imams and their nationals out of Canada – for this is consistent with the truest of Sharia law, not to sojourn in the land of the infidel.

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Ban handguns under Bill C-71? An idea full of holes.

Vincent J. Curtis

3 Aug 2018

RE: It’s time for Canada to consider a handgun ban.

The Hamilton Spectator tried to make a reasonable sounding appeal for the banning of handguns.

The Spectator’s argument to consider a ban on handguns is shot full of holes.

Let’s consider the Spectator’s facts.  The shooting in Greektown was committed by Faisal Hussain, who was not the gun’s owner.  He took it from his brother, Fahad, who is comatose from a drug overdose and who is not a lawful owner himself.  The gun in question is illegal in Canada because it is capable of fully automatic fire, and was reportedly stolen in Saskatoon after being illegally imported from the United States.

Since the illegal owning of illegal handguns in Canada is already banned, it is not clear that the banning of legal handguns legally owned by law-abiding Canadians would have stopped the Greektown shooting.  The proposed solution doesn't solve the very problem it is offered to solve.

The banning of handguns would create an altogether new mass of gun-criminals in Canada: the formerly law-abiding gun owners who were made felons by the new law, until such time as they turned them in.  That leaves open the question of who, exactly, is going to collect these hundreds of thousands of guns, and how will the blameless owners be compensated for the dispossession of their formerly legal property?

Then there is the problem of equal treatment under the law, as guaranteed under the Charter  If farmers, hunters, trappers, and Aboriginals have legitimate reasons for owning long-guns, why can’t target shooters or collectors own them – are their reasons not “legitimate” and aren’t they equal under the law?  Is gun ownership an Aboriginal right?

Why should the police be armed under the new legal regime?  They aren’t in the UK.  The murder rate in London now exceeds that of New York City, but it is accomplished with knives and motor vehicles instead of guns.  Gun bans don’t solve the underlying social issues that give rise to violence.

Here’s my modest proposal: deport all males between the ages of 15 and 50 of Jamaican or Middle-Eastern descent.  Among them and in the drug trade is where the illegal and violent misuse of guns lies.  But so radical a solution would never be adopted, so instead the comfortably ignorant wish to discharge their pain on the law-abiding and the invisible.

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