I blame the wackos

Vincent J. Curtis

18 Feb 2019

[although this is Hamilton specific, it contains observations about environmentalism in general.]

  

Trouble with the Red Hill Expressway?  Water doesn’t drain away quick enough?  Road weaves too much?  Asphalt a little slick?

I blame the wackos – the environmentalist wackos who have afflicted the Expressway project since the 1970s.

You have to be of a certain age to remember the vigor and intensity of the opposition to building a road that became part of Hamilton’s official transportation plan in 1963.  Remember the save the valley campaign of the 1970s and early 1980s?  The professional integrity of every engineer who supported the plan was unscrupulously attacked.  The NDP government of Bob Rae withheld funding.  When construction finally began, wackos were trying to live in trees to halt it.  This die-in-the-last-ditch resistance was based ostensibly on environmentalism.

The environmentalist wackos claimed that the rare Red Hill flying squirrel would go extinct if the road were built.  The wackos claimed that the Red Hill valley was a “lung” of the city, purifying the air, and the city would be overwhelmed with air pollution if a road was run down the “lung.”  No objection went unused.

The Consolidated Hearings Board of 1985 recommended approval of the project to the Ontario government with a proviso that the design of the road take into account some of the concerns of the wackos.

An important thing to understand about environmentalism is that it places a higher value on the “environment” – whatever that means - than it does on human life.  One concern of the wackos was that storm run-off from the road would “scour” the bed of the Red Hill creek, whose course, being natural, mustn’t be touched.  Well, some modification was inevitable, but the engineers took the rate of run-off concern seriously.  There are large catch basins at the top of the Expressway that collect run-off, and the flow into the creek is throttled.  The initial design didn’t work out so well, and some flooding of homes occurred.

The banking of curves in roads is important in the speed at which those curves can be safely taken.  The greater the banking, the higher the safe speed.  But the higher the banking, the faster the run-off of water.  If the degree of banking were low to reduce the speed of run-off, and hence the “scouring” of the creek bed, it would mean that water would remain on the road longer and the safe speed of the curve would be lower – wet or dry.

If, in addition, the road were made curvy rather than straight in order to accommodate the existing creek bed and to reduce the rate of run-off, you create a road that imposes more lateral forces on the traffic than is necessary.  Lateral forces that engage with the low banking in the unnecessary curves.

Two other gestures to the wackos were: to call the road a “Parkway” rather than an “Expressway” and to set the speed limit at a low 90 kph.  Under normal conditions, a highway speed of 100 kph would be expected, and I’m sure a speed study would show that average traffic speeds are at least that or more.  The difference between normal highway speed and posted speed limit tends to create a differential of 30 kph under normal conditions, on a curvy road with low banking.  On dry pavement in daylight, no big problem.

On wet pavement or at night, a large speed differential could become a problem if drivers don’t adapt to the conditions and if slow drivers don’t politely stay in the right lane.  Straight road, less of a problem.

It’s rich to watch vengeful wackos laugh in grim triumph as the city encounters alleged problems with the Expressway.  If the city is having problems is it because the traffic engineers who designed the road didn’t follow the purest principles of good road construction but shaved at the edges to accommodate the concerns of the wackos?

The climate of recrimination created by wacko tactics in the past may be corrupting management of the problems caused by accommodating wacko concerns.

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Vincent J. Curtis testified in support of the Expressway before the Consolidated Hearings Board in 1985.

Spec reported Matthew Van Dongen confirmed my point about margins of safety being compromised by meeting environmentalist's objections in an article headlined, "More light needed on crash-prone Red Hill." 20 Feb 2019.

Inglis. Hi-Power. 75 Years. (Get Some!)

Vincent J. Curtis

12 Oct 2018

As Esprit de Corps’ resident Colonel Blimp, an “old Cold War warhorse,” an archaic ‘death or glory type’, I’d like to put a good word for Canada’s old armaments makers.  Specifically, John Inglis and Company.

You would be correct to associate John Inglis with Bren guns, of which it made some 186,000 examples during the Second World War.  But it is also famous for the Inglis Hi-Power pistol, which the Canadian army adopted as its standard sidearm in 1944.  These self-same handguns are now completing their 75^th year of continuous service in the Canadian armament inventory.

The Inglis Hi-Power eclipses in duration of service the Colt M1911, which was the standard issue U.S. sidearm from 1911 to 1985, a total of 74 years.  The M1911, another John Browning design, was manufactured in several batches: for World War I, in the 1920s and 1930s, and then in another massive wave during World War II.  None of the guns made in 1911 served all the way through to 1985.  The handguns made by John Inglis and in service to this day were made between February 1944 and October 1945.

The Hi-Power was John Browning’s last design, and he did not live to complete it.  Working with Fabrique Nationale, Browning sought to develop a pistol that would meet the requirements issued by the French military in the 1920s for a new pistol: a high capacity, semi-automatic in nine millimetre calibre and with a magazine disconnect safety device.  Browning’s collaborator at FN was Dieudonné Saive who developed the double-stacked, single feed magazine that is now standard today in practically all modern high capacity pistols.  Browning looked to improve upon his M1911 design, and he had to get around the patents he had sold to Colt.  The trigger mechanism in particular had to be changed, in part to incorporate the magazine disconnect mechanism.

Ultimately, the French didn’t buy, and it was the Belgian military that adopted the model in 1935.  Hence, it is also sometimes referred to as the P-35.  When the Germans overran Belgium in 1940, Saive escaped and fled to Britain, taking with him several examples.

 

The Nationalist Chinese government came to Canada shopping for Bren guns, and in passing asked if Inglis could also make them the Browning Hi-Power which the Chinese liked and had bought directly from FN before 1940.  Canada’s lend-lease agency, the Mutual Aid Board, agreed to fund the purchase of 180,000, and Britain wanted an additional 50,000.  With orders of this scale, Inglis set about to manufacture the Browning Hi-Power in Toronto.  With the help of Saive, Inglis developed its own version built upon English measurements instead of metric.

Mass production began in February, 1944.  The first allotment was sent to India for transshipment over “the Hump” but the logistical absurdity then became apparent.  Besides this, at that point of the war, the Nationalist Chinese were more interested in fighting the Communists than the Japanese, and so the bulk of that Chinese order was cancelled.  Canada had thousands of these handguns just sitting around and, with all this production capacity, the Canadian army decided to appropriate them for its own use  The Inglis Hi-Power replaced the venerable Webley revolver in Canadian service in late 1944.

Eventually the Canadian army received nearly 60,000 Inglis Hi-Powers in the Chinese and No. 2 Mk 1* patterns.

After the war, the Hi-Power became a de-facto military standard, and was adopted as a side-arm in about fifty countries.  Most of these were made by FN in Belgium after the war.  Today, the original Inglis Hi-Power remains in service in Canada and Taiwan.  The Inglis tooling and dies were shipped to India’s Ishapore factory and were used to make side-arms for India.

After 75 years of continuous use in the Canadian military and with roughly 14,000 left in inventory, the Inglis Hi-Power is coming to the end of its useful life.  FN ceased production in 2017.  Fashions are changing.  Given the newer materials of construction, it is unlikely that any of the possible replacements – the plastic wonder 9s - will serve as long as the all-steel Inglis Hi-Power.

Will the government surplus these old warhorses to the Canadian market place?

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Global Warming, Polar Vortex: Don't believe your lyin' eyes

Vincent J. Curtis

1 Feb 2019

Don’t believe your lyin’ eyes and keep the faith.  That was the gist of the Spectator editorial. (Get out of the cold and think about global warming.  1 Feb 2019)

 Apparently, a polar vortex is a sign of climate change caused by man, even though these things aren’t supposed to happen until fifty to eighty years from now, according to the models.

North America experienced a polar vortex during the winter of 1977, when Buffalo had a snowfall every day for two and a half months straight.  The belief in those days was of a coming ice age, and the polar vortex was a sign of it.

Cold being a sign of coming cold makes more sense than cold being a sign of coming warmth.  But the coming ice age theory gave way in the late 1980s to the coming thermal catastrophe theory.  And so the same phenomenon is explained by diametrically opposite reasons.

Climate change has become a cult or religion, and the editorial urged continued belief in the religion in the face of contra-indicating facts.  Baal, the god of environmentalism, must be pleased.

***

The editorial offered a number of facts in support of its position that simply aren’t facts, though one can understand why the editors would be misled.  In the first place, it consults with people whose job depends upon the continued belief in the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis.

The hottest decade “on record” is without doubt the 1930s.  The year 1934 is the hottest “on record” with 1936 being the next hottest.  The earth entered a period of consistent cooling between 1940 and 1970, with a couple of spikes in the 1950s.  This period of consistent cooling is what led to the coming ice age hypothesis.  The year 2018 is not the forth hottest year “on record”, and if it were, it would require an explanation for the cooling that occurred from the three hotter years – a cooling that should not have occurred.

I put “on record” in scare quotes for a couple of reasons.  First, is that the “record” doesn’t begin until 1880, when the United States established its continental weather network.  The “ record” from around the world did not become much good until about 1950, when weather stations became established truly around the world - in significant numbers and in significant places other than the United States.  Hence the 1930s may not be part of the “on record” period.

The second reason is that NOAA has been tampering with the historical data in order to make it appear that there is a continuous warming trend.  They call what they do “normalizing.”  Hence, terrestrial thermometric readings appear to show an upward trend in temperatures, when satellite temperature measurements show no significant change in global temperatures since 1998.  This failure to observe global warming by satellite is the global warming pause that requires an explanation, and this pause is why climate changers are talking about warming of the deep oceans: the oceans ate my warming.

I would have hoped that the series of pieces I sent in December would have at least given pause to the Spectator’s editorializing on global warming, but I guess the faith in Baal, the god of environmentalism, is too strong.

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