Ranked balloting advocated again. Dead Horses lie everywhere.

Vincent J. Curtis

19 Nov 2018

RE: Hamilton Deserves a Better Voting System (Hamilton Spectator 17 Nov 2018)

It is not enough for Mr. Brad Walchuk to huff and puff about ranked balloting, claiming there is a democratic deficit and saying that ranked balloting is better than the system we have now – plurality election.

He has to do his homework.  Ranked balloting is not a new issue, and several decisive counter-arguments have been advanced over the years against it and against the assertion of a democratic deficit.  He has to address and answer the objections.  He does not.

One objection is that ranked balloting cannot follow its own principle.  In the by-election that saw Donna Skelly elected in Ward 7, Skelly won against 16 other candidates.  Even if voters were forced to rank all 17, Skelly’s vote count could never plausibly be massaged above 50 percent.  (And less than 30 percent of the electorate bothered to vote, creating an insuperable obstacle to the principle of 50 percent and the "democratic deficit.")

Ranked balloting can be defeated by widespread plunking.  Ranked balloting simply fails in some instances, so why not go whole hog and hold run-off elections – or is that too expensive?

You have to do your homework.  The system of plurality election, the standard method since the first parliaments of England, remains the best.  That’s why we still have it.

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Stats Can shows gun control bill won't help.

Vincent J. Curtis

24 Nov 2019

RE:  Guns, gangs blamed as homicides hit 10-year high.

Statistics Canada has spoken, and perhaps now the Liberal government and its running dog lackey, the Spectator editorial department, can end its thoughtless jihad against law-abiding gun owners.

As declared in this space, the increases gun homicides are due to gang violence in the major cities, Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal.  Taking guns away from Alberta rancher and Hamilton homeowners isn’t going to change the gang problem in Vancouver.

The Stats Can report also put dimensions to the size of the issue.  Briefly, the numbers are so small that gun-violence is not at a crisis level – demanding action! – and that so-called assault rifles are a tiny and shrinking part of the problem, such as it is.

The smart thing the government is doing is putting more money into intelligence gathering and border security.  These gangs are ethno-centric in origin, and they survive by preying on the ethnic community in which they live.  It won’t be easy for police to gather intelligence from these communities.  Police will almost certainly be accused of racism by pursuing ethno-centric gangs, so expect it

Nevertheless, the process of assimilation into the wider Canadian society will require these communities to accept policing and the Canadian law that that policing upholds.

Meanwhile, the law-abiding can be left alone.

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The hokey hockey stick

Vincent J. Curtis

25 Nov 2018

When people think of global warming, most think of the hockey stick graph.  This graph, produced by Michael Mann from a study of tree rings, shows essentially constant temperatures from 1000 A.D. to 1950, followed by an sharp increase.  This hockey stick graph is claimed to show the evil effects on global temperature of the industrialization of the western world, particularly of the United States.

To the discerning eye, the graph seemed odd.  It failed to show the medieval warm period (950 – 1250) and the little ice age (1300 – 1850), which are well known and well documented phenomena.  The business of calibrating the thickness of a tree ring to an average annual temperature seemed to make dramatic assumptions about other growth factors, such a sunlight, rainfall, species of tree, and local accidents of fertilization.  In addition, trees only cover about 15 % of the earth’s surface.  The oceans cover about 70 percent of the surface; there are no trees in the Antarctic, the Arctic, and the great deserts of the world; and the question of representativeness arises.

Then there is the problem of accuracy of measurement.  Tree rings are irregular in shape, vary greatly in thickness around the tree, and, most importantly, the boundary of a ring is not sharp.  The black hash mark on a wide-range mercury thermometer enables an observer to read temperatures reliably to within half, or maybe a quarter of a degree.  Yet the hockey stick graph confidently showed temperature to hundredths of a degree!

Some funny things started to happen.  Ross McKitrick, a professor of economics at the University of Guelph showed that the sampling and the way Mann handled the data would have produced a hockey-stick graph regardless of the input data.  Then, Mann’s original raw data set was “lost” and all that was available to other researchers was Mann’s processed data set.

Then it became clear that Mann had used not tree-ring data for the twentieth century temperatures but thermometric data instead.  The thermometric data showed an increase in temperature – while the tree ring data showed a decrease in temperature!  Mann used the thermometric data on the grounds that it was more reliable, even if the graph is lacking in consistency.

Mann’s hockey stick graph is insufficient on which to base wide-ranging political or economic decisions, for it demonstrates nothing scientifically.  In the first place, it offers no cause.  Nobody has duplicated Mann’s work.  Even more important is the failure to detect the two large natural variations in global average temperature; the medieval warm period and the little ice age.  Had these been plotted on Mann’s graph, the increase shown from 1950 could be inconveniently interpreted as another example of natural variation.

Mann’s graph, which demonstrates no cause-effect relationship, has been seized upon for political purposes, and raises the question of whether it was created to feed into a political narrative that had been fermenting since the late 1980’s.  An admission of natural variation of global average temperature would vex the narrative that immoderate economic success by the United States in particular was endangering the future of the world.

Between 1940 and 1970, global average temperatures fell, which gave rise to the global cooling scare of the 1970s.  The extinction of the dinosaurs was claimed to have been caused by the global cooling caused by a meteor impact, and a “nuclear winter” was feared as a result of a war caused by Ronald Reagan.  After it became clear that global temperatures were warming again, Dr. James Hansen of NASA in 1988 advanced the global warming caused by American industrial activity hypothesis.  Since 1998, however, satellite measurements of average global temperatures has shown no increase – a twenty year pause in global warming.

The utter politicization of the global warming issue has poisoned “climate science.”  As revealed in the climategate emails, legitimate scientists who wanted to study natural variability were driven out of the field by sordid means to protect the political narrative.

Real science doesn’t offer opinions.  It doesn’t fear contradiction.  Climate science has to dissociate itself from the hockey stick graph, from rampant data manipulation, and from far-fetched forecasts of catastrophe that cannot be scientifically demonstrated.

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Whose statutes should be thrown down?

Vincent J. Curtis

13 Nov 2018

A controversial part of the “reconciliation” between Canada and aboriginals, is the disgracing of what were once Canadian heroes.  Statues to Sir John A. Macdonald are being removed everywhere in Canada because he instituted the residential schools movement. Hector Langevin and even George Ryerson are being disgraced for their connection with residential schools.

So far, no one has focussed attention on Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Jean Chretien as bad actors also to be disgraced in this reconciliation process - and their sins are more personal than those of Macdonald, Langevin, or Ryerson.

Pierre Trudeau’s great project as Prime Minister of Canada was the patriation of the Canadian constitution and to have entrenched within it a Charter of Human Rights.  He accomplished this goal in 1982.  In the opening phases of this great project, Trudeau and his Minister of Indian Affairs Jean Chretien proposed abolishing Indian status, abolishing all Indian treaties, abolishing all Indian reserves, and abolishing the Indian Act.  All references to Indians would be wiped from Canadian law.  This policy proposal was put forward in a 1969 White Paper entitled, “Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy.”

Why would a good, progressive Liberal propose abolishing Indian status?  To understand, you have to know the times and how they related to the aim of entrenching a charter of human rights in the constitution.  The 1950s and 1960s saw tremendous turmoil in the United States concerning civil rights.  These were the days of Brown v. Board of Education, of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, the Ku Klux Klan, the freedom riders, the Civil Rights Act, the Vietnam War and the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK.  This turmoil was over the equal treatment in law and in fact of black and white Americans by civil authorities.  The justification for equal treatment was that blacks were as much a human beings and as American as any white American.

That all human beings are equally human and that justice requires the equal treatment of equals was the irrefutable logic of the Civil Rights movement.  In Canada, Indians (and I am going to use that term of law and custom) were regarded as a people apart.  Canada had a duty of care towards Indians, but from 1867 to 1950 Indians were not Canadian.  They were not British subjects.  The passage of the Citizenship Act granted Canadian Indians citizenship status, with all the rights and privileges thereof.  But they retained these other rights and privileges as Indians.

Pierre Trudeau, to create a charter of equal human rights, sought to eliminate this anomaly in Canadian law that was based on race -  to create only one class of persons in law whose rights could be specified without qualification.  There being only one class,  all within it were equal.  Pierre Trudeau believed that after a hundred years of exposure to western civilization and with the prospect of hundreds of years more exposure, Indian culture was done - changed irretrievably; racial purity was being lost, and assimilation was inevitable for the Indian race.

Negative reaction to the White Paper killed it, and aboriginal activism and aboriginal land claims began as a reaction against the White Paper.  This failure to abolish Indian status in law is why the Charter of 1982 has anomalous carve outs for aboriginal rights.

The sense of “First Nations” status among Indians is sincerely felt.  They accept Canadian citizenship as unavoidable and convenient, but Canada is not their “nation.”  The term and concept of nation is borrowed from western culture and is used to helps the western mind understand the distinction between Canadian and Indian.  Yes, Indian and Canadian are both humans, but that is irrelevant.  Indians are distinct from Canadians on the basis of race and origin.  Indians and Canadians belong to different nations and occupy different spaces, with some overlap forced on Indians by Canada.

In February, 2014, the Liberal Party “renounced with regret” the White Paper of 1969, but the issue of assimilation, of loss of culture and of racial purity - the definitive terms of what it means to be Indian - remains, and will plague indefinitely the Indians of Canada.

If reconciliation requires the condemnation of Canadian heroes, Trudeau and Chretien, for observing the obvious, seem to deserve it as much as Macdonald.

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Vincent J. Curtis is a Canadian free-lance writer.

A Hundred Years On

Vincent J. Curtis

25 Sept 2018

They’re all dead now.  Every last one of them.  Not a single survivor of the Great War remains.  But, a hundred years ago…

November 1-2, 1918, at Valenciennes, the Canadian Corps fought its last major, set-piece battle.  General Currie, as was his wont, sought to minimize casualties, and preceded the attack with an extremely heavy bombardment upon the heights of Mont Houy, the key terrain south of the town.  When the 4^th Canadian Division swept up the heights, the German defenses of the entire Hermann Line collapsed, and the German army began a general withdrawal eastward.  The final pursuit to Mons began.

Battle then took on a rhythm.  The Germans would withdraw in the night and the Canadian Corps would advance to contact from dawn till about noon.  The advance patrols would contact the German rearguard and halt, awaiting the artillery and main force to come up.  The rest of the day was spent clearing out the defensive posts and then consolidating by nightfall.  Next day, the reserve force would pass through the forward line in leap-frog fashion and continue the pursuit.  By November 10^th, the Canadian Corps was approaching the city of Mons, the place that in August, 1914 the British army first encountered the advancing Germans.

November 10^th began as any other.  The 2^nd Canadian Division approached Hyon, south of Mons.  German machine gun posts and artillery raked the advancing Canadians.  By repeated and determined infantry attacks throughout the day, supported by machine guns and the 5^th Brigade CFA, the Canadians forced their way forward.  At dusk, forward patrols reported the Germans withdrawing from Hyon,  In the early morning hours of the 11^th, elements of the 2^nd Canadian Division occupied Hyon and pressed on to the Bois la Haut, good ground whose defense could have made further advance eastward costly.  Leapfrogging forces again, elements of the 2^nd Canadian Division pressed on in the night, and in the early morning hours of the 11^th reached St. Symphorien, three miles east of Mons.  At 5:30 a.m., the 3^rd Canadian Division linked up with the 2^nd east of Mons

Word was getting around of an Armistice, to take effect at 11:00 a.m. that day.  Mons itself was entered and occupied early on the morning of the 11^th.  At 10:58 a.m., Private George L. Price was killed, the last Canadian fatality of the war.  And then, it ended.

That was it.  Armistice. The war to end all wars was over.  Done.  Finished.  Kaput

Well, there was the business of following the Germans back into their own territory, to make sure they did.  And then, it was the long wait to get home.

Currie was not happy at the way the war ended, believing the Germans had not been taught a lesson, and fearing they would try again in twenty years.

The war to end all wars, wasn’t.  It’s funny, but war-fighting leadership is regarded as not civilized enough for supreme leadership roles in peacetime.

The French political leadership between the wars was not up to the calibre of a Clemenceau.  The French generals, Gamelin and Weygand, were not of the quality of a Ferdinand Foch.  The British political leadership was equally feckless during the crucial period of the 1930s.  Winston Churchill was in his political wilderness.

If France had mobilized in 1936 upon the occupation of the Rhineland by a single German battalion, Hitler would have suffered a humiliated and probably fatal reverse.  Later came the shameful Munich agreement.  President Edward Benes of Czechoslovakia should have fought the Germans over the Sudetenland, where all the best defensive ground and fixed Czech fortifications were.  We now know that the German army was in no condition to overwhelm the Czechs, and the fighting would have raised a political whirlwind in Britain and France.

Finally, French leadership embarrassed their heritage of martial élan by not vigorously attacking Germany from the west as Germany advanced into Poland in September 1939.  We now know that an immediate French offensive would have reached Berlin without opposition because the Germans put everything they had into Poland.

By 1940, it was too late.  A new maelstrom began – even larger than the last.

Lest we forget.

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Canada’s Leadership in NATO

Vincent J. Curtis

23 July 2018

Before the July 10-11 NATO conference, Prime Minister Justine Trudeau let it be known that Canada planned to “extend its leadership” in Latvia for several more years.  He would “deliver a strong message of solidarity” during a visit to that country.

Before the announcement, Canada was scheduled to end its commitment of 450 troops in Latvia in the spring of 2019.  The new commitment will see a presence of 540 troops until at least 2023.

Presently, Canada spends 134 million dollars per year on the Latvian deployment.  For that much dough, it is fair to ask: how many thousand medium- and heavy-machine guns have been sent to Latvia?  How many thousand medium and heavy anti-tank weapons?  How many hundreds of guns?  What about air defence against helicopters and fast-movers?

Has ammunition sufficient to sustain thirty days of heavy, continuous battle been stockpiled?  How many battle positions have been surveyed, roughed in, and camouflaged?  Iran built complexes well below ground to protect its nuclear development from air attack and surveillance from space.  How much digging has been done to harden Latvia’s defenses from a surprise bolt from the blue?

Has serious war-gaming of a Russian invasion taken place?

Has Latvia been encouraged to adopt a U.S.-style Second Amendment so that its citizens can acquire both handguns and telescoped hunting rifles in military calibres?   Latvia many not have the topographical advantages of Switzerland, but an armed citizenry can make conquering a small country as healthy as a python swallowing a porcupine.

Those are some of the measures that take the Russian imperial threat seriously.  But what do we actually see?  We see that Canada contributes a half battalion to a “battle group” that includes soldiers from Albania, Slovkia, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the Czech Republic.  The best will in the world couldn’t hold together a “battle group” so composed that was under serious onslaught.  And is there so much as a squadron of main battle tanks, i.e. Leopard IIs, in Latvia?

We see press releases that speak of the creation of a ‘divisional’ headquarters for the three NATO “battle groups” operating in the three Baltic States.  It is supposed to be established in Riga, the capital of Latvia; and Canada’s contribution would be of staff officers.

It is great that NATO would deploy a forward divisional headquarters, except that it quickly will morph from a tactical entity to a political-bureaucratic assemblage, like NATO headquarters itself, or some UN peacekeeping mission HQ.  Latvia would be crazy to subordinate its national defence to a NATO forward headquarters that would have to ask the permission of main NATO HQ to fire back.  It is quite possible that in the midst of confusion, NATO will wait long enough for serious, tactically devastating, inroads to have occurred in Latvia before issuing the order to resist.

With the drive to bureaucratize NATO’s commitment to the Baltic States, the effort takes on the appearance of a UN peacekeeping mission, which tries to crush the problem under the weight of time and bureaucratic processes.  The flaw in that approach is that it presents cobwebs against a real onslaught.  Peacekeeping missions work when each antagonist lacks the strength to overwhelm the other, and both sides are looking for a face-saving way out of a trial of strength - like Sinai from 1956 to 1967, or Cyprus from 1964 to the present.  In Afghanistan, the Taliban lack the power to overwhelm tiny ISAF, and they aren’t winning the endurance battle either.

Russia, however, is a powerful country, and it would be easy for her, at a time of her choosing, to project her military strength against the weak Baltic States.  That she has not yet is due to the decisions made by President Vladimir Putin, who isn’t going to risk his prestige on anything less than a sure thing.

Building up NATO’s combat power generally is one form of deterrence against attack.  Granting Russia and Putin the prestige he thinks they deserve could be another, indirect, form, and that explains why Trump met with Putin in Helsinki right after castigating NATO countries about inadequate spending.

The NATO effort in the Baltics cannot crush a problem under the weight of bureaucracy.  Its purpose must be to decline battle – by turning the Baltic States into such tough and time-consuming nuts to crack that their defences won’t be tested.  A real sign of leadership by Canada in the Baltics would be to demand more firepower and less bureaucracy.

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