Trump haters can't part with collusion fixation.

Vincent J. Curtis

27 Mar 2019

[The article at reference below was written by John Kneeland, a Canadian-American bi-national who is an adamant Democrat supporter.  His writings appear occasionally in the Hamilton Spectator.  This one appeared today, and it was typical of the Democrat response to the Barr letter: denial and a demand to see the underlying document.  He focused on Mueller not clearing Trump on obstruction charges.]

The last time we heard from John Kneeland, he was confidently predicting the imminent demise of President Donald Trump.  Now that the Mueller investigation is done, Kneeland is tap-dancing desperately to avoid admitting that he was utterly and completely wrong.

Mueller found no evidence of collusion, and Mueller was too much the Trump hater himself to admit that firing James Comey was not an act of obstruction of justice.  Disregarding that Trump exercised his Article 2 powers with the recommendation of Deputy Attorney-General Rod Rosenstein, it is hard to obstruct justice when there is no underlying crime.  Mueller’s prosecutorial tactics were so extreme they were unethical, but he couldn’t beat a conspiracy out of his witnesses.  Mueller has discredited the use of a Special Council.

Now the reaction cometh.  The Russian collusion hoax did not originate out of thin air.  It was concocted.  John Brennan, head of the CIA, began running agents-provocateur at the fringes of the Trump campaign as early as March, 2016.  Australian diplomat Alex Downer, a friend of the Clintons, got involved with Brennan’s scheming.  The Clinton campaign hired Fusion GPS to conduct “research” on Trump, and together with former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, concocted the fraudulent dossier which allegedly showed the collusion between Donald Trump and “Russia.”

James Comey, as head of the FBI and another hater of Donald Trump, ordered FISA warrants be obtained to spy on the Trump campaign, then the transition, and then into September, 2017, when Trump was the sitting president.  The entire top echelon of Obama’s FBI have been fired, retired, resigned, or reassigned as a result of their involvement in this notorious activity.  The fate of Rod Rosenstein is coming into question because of his involvement in an attempted coup against Trump involving the 25^th amendment and the renewal of the FISA warrants.

Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and Ben Rhodes were involved in the unmasking and leaking the conversation between Trump’s first NSA Mike Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, in which Flynn urged Russia not to overreact to a provocation by Barack Obama in the middle of the transition period.  The entire top echelon of Obama’s security services and his National Security Council team were involved in trying to bring down Donald Trump.

All this will be coming out within the next few years.  You heard it here first.
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Progressive NZ politicians created the mess

Vincent J. Curtis

19 Mar 2019

All-seeing, all-knowing progressivist politicians are forever boasting of their superior virtue and superior insight into human nature.  So, why didn’t these superior beings see the Christchurch slaughter coming?

They ought to have known that there are white, right-wing “nationalists” in their midst, in their domestic population - from the very group of people they themselves came from.  When given political power they decided to improve New Zealand society by encouraging and allowing the immigration of large numbers of Middle Easterners into the country.  These immigrants are of a different race, different culture, different religion, and different language.  They are notorious for not assimilating into the host society and are not backward about pressing for their “rights.”

These are the very kind of people that provoke white, right-wing “nationalists.”  Yet, the progressives did it anyhow.  They put nitro and glycerine together, and act all indignant after something explosive happened.

The proposed solution to the problem they created is to clamp down on free speech, and to take people’s guns away.  Not just the guns and free-speech rights of white, right-wing “nationalists,” but of everybody.

Perhaps a better solution would be to replace the people who created this madcap situation with others who actually are serious, not just progressives who play it well before the TV cameras.
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Blame Left Virtue Signalling for New Zealand

Vincent J. Curtis

17 Mar 2019

Much of the world press are exhausting adjectives describing right-wingers and their role in the New Zealand attack, it should pause and look into the mirror.  Do they understand the significance, in terms of Sharia Supremacism, of there being not one but two mosques in a place called Christchurch?

New Zealand is a remote outpost of western civilization far away in the southwest Pacific.  This island country of fewer than five million is farther from the Middle East than Europe and North America are.  And in this small country’s third city there are enough Middle Easterners to support two mosques.  How did this happen?

Middle Easterners are of a different race, different language, different culture, different religion; they do not assimilate and are not backward about asserting their rights.  The geniuses who ran New Zealand’s immigration policy ought to have known the social tensions they were creating.

But no.  They were too busy virtue signalling on the backs of others.  They were proving to themselves that they weren’t racists. At the same time, they weren’t having their faces shoved every day into the consequences of their policies either.

Do-gooding left-wingers created the explosive mixture in New Zealand.  There are hot-heads in every society, and those who created this mess ought to have known it was just a matter of time before the social tensions exploded.

Those who created the social tensions in New Zealand deserve to be tarred and feathered.

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Socialism in America

Vincent J. Curtis

11 Mar 2019

A strange political conversation is taking place in the Democratic party of the United States.  It isabout whether the United States of America should become a socialist country.

It is remarkable that this conversation is taking place in the country that is regarded as the citadel of capitalism.  The United States vanquished National Socialism in 1945 and International Socialism in 1991.  Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea remain as examples of socialist outcomes today.

The conversation on socialism in America is incoherent.  Capitalism and socialism are not ideological opposites.  Socialism refers to a high degree of state control, and capitalism to a low degree. Socialism is an ideology, but capitalism is not – though it can be made out to be.  The programs the Democrats are calling socialism are, in fact, radical new uses of state power for social aims.

Strictly speaking, socialism is when the means of production and exchange are owned or tightly regulated by the state.  Obviously, there can be socialism in degrees, and state control often extends beyond basic economics.  But, the essence of socialism is that it is an ideology of state control and power for the sake of a greater good.  Socialism was invented.  The need for socialism is often asserted dogmatically, the sign of an ideology.

“Capitalism” is an absence of ideology.  No ideology is vindicated when a farmer hires help to bring in the harvest.  No ideology is vindicated when a business owner hires workers to make a product or deliver a service.  No ideology is vindicated when someone pays you for something you’re selling, or when you barter at a swap meet.

An ideology is vindicated, however, when that farm is collectivized, when that business is appropriated by the state, and when private transactions are made illegal – for the sake of a higher good.

Free markets simply come to be.  They are empirical.  Capitalism was not invented, it developed practically.  Human beings engaged in commerce long before the invention of government.  But government does have great usefulness in ensuring the fairness and regulation of markets.  State power can enforce the trust that is necessary for commerce.

Socialism was invented as a redress and punishment for the excesses of 19^th century industrialization.  Capitalism was constructed as a rival ideology by the socialists and communists of the day, something to contrast their new ideology against.

The habit of creating ideologies became a feature of 20^th century political thinking.  Everybody had to have an ideology.  You were a socialist, a communist, a fascist, an imperialist, a mercantilist, a capitalist.  The believers in less government foolishly adopted capitalism as their ideology.  In doing so, they admitted the premises of socialism to the conversation.  The socialist construct of economic morality becomes the frame of the discussion, against which the “capitalist” can only offer practical rebuttals, which lack a ring of moral vengeance.

Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders is the leading candidate so far for the Democrat nomination.  He honeymooned in the Soviet Union in 1974.  His models of socialism are the Scandinavian countries, which in reality have mixed economies.  These work because those countries are small, are racially, religiously, and culturally homogenous, and – importantly - have limited immigration.

The battle for the Democrat nomination in 2020 is between the old socialist Sanders and those who are adopting the “New Green Deal” socialism of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

You would think that after 100 million dead and the example of Venezuela before the nation’s eyes, the Sanders brand of socialism would be discredited at the starting gate.

The annihilating critique of the Green New Deal by Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore ought to have discredited the foolish AOC aims of state power.

That socialism could be seriously discussed nowadays is attributed by critics to the robbery that passes for an education in the humanities.  At American universities, empirical thinking is discouraged and ideologies, to which conformity is expected, form the core of the curriculum.  Rot in higher education is why political correctness and free-speech suppression are so prevalent, and why the moral vengeance of socialism is appealing.
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Vincent J. Curtis is a research scientist and occasional free-lance writer.

Sausage Making the Trudeau Way

Vincent J. Curtis

7 Mar 2019

Self-respecting people do not watch laws or sausages being made, said German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.  Justin Trudeau promised that his sausage making would be downright pretty and wholesome.

In the 2015 election, Trudeau promised to stimulate the economy by a three-year series of deficits followed by a return to balance in 2019 – without doing the math.

He promised to change parliamentary representation – without realizing he’d need a constitutional convention to do so.

He promised reconciliation with aboriginal First Nations – without understanding the nature of aboriginal society.

He promised feminism and progressivism to prevail – and produced a cabinet of perfect gender equality and great racial mixture regardless of merit.

No one seemed to detect a pragmatic political operator behind the mask of sunny-ways progressivism.  Until the contradictions in his promises became evident in the form of Jody Wilson-Raybould, and then in her BFF Jane Philpott.

It was perfectly reasonable of the PM to have ordered his Attorney-General to take the Deferred Prosecution Agreement approach to settling the SNC-Lavalin affair.  But such a masculine directness was antithetical to feminist-progressivism, and so he resorted to the indirect methods of feminism.  He sent messengers to urge the merits of the preferred solution – so many in fact that the dim or unyielding A-G felt pressured “inappropriately” (a feminist code-word.)

Trudeau’s response was like Clinton’s discrediting of Monica, all very progressive in style.

Trudeau’s fall from grace comes not from his handling of SNC-Lavalin, but from the shock of seeing that feminist sausage-making is still ugly.
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Trudeau hoist on his own petard

Vincent J. Curtis

2 Mar 2019

In the SNC-Lavalin affair, we see nemesis following hubris.  Justin Trudeau formed his cabinet with sex and race the uppermost consideration.  His cabinet was oh-so progressive, multiracial and exactly fifty percent female.

His ministers were chosen on the basis of identity politics. Their race and sex forms the most important part of them.  Jody Wilson-Raybould was the aboriginal woman - whose loyalties were divided between Canada and aboriginal First Nations.  She approached her job of Minister of Justice from a feminist and aboriginal perspective.

When the SNC-Lavalin affair came along, her feminist-aboriginal sensitivities were irritated.  The concerns of a Quebec based corporation got first class treatment from the PMO, while those of aboriginals got slow, back seat treatment.  This was her opportunity to stick it to Quebec on behalf of aboriginals.

The feminist Justin Trudeau resorted to womanly methods to correct the course Wilson-Raybould was on.  He sent messengers who “inappropriately” “pressured” her in the direction of a Deferred Prosecution Agreement.  Either she didn’t get it, or didn’t want to get it.  In her matriarchal First Nation, a woman’s decision was the law.  Trudeau disdained the manly approach of a face-to-face meeting in which he gave her direct instructions, which she could either accept or resign.

Impervious to PMO messengers, she got shuffled into another portfolio.

Now she’s employing the word “inappropriate” like climate changers fling about “denier.”

The feminist Trudeau, being associated with “inappropriate” conduct hoists him on his feminist-progressive petard.
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SNC Lavalin: No "Inappropriate" Pressure

Vincent J. Curtis

28 Feb 2019

I wonder if the Canadian politicians and media really understand the Canadian constitution, or if they aren’t exploiting for their own purposes a gullible public.

In Canada, the Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of Canada is a political figure.  The permanent bureaucracy reports to a political figure, a member of the Cabinet.  For decades, the minister of Justice was a Quebec MP, to calm fears of the political intentions of the Justice Department.

The prosecution of the Vice-Admiral Mark Norman is entirely political.

(Those from southern Ontario who recall "Caledonia" and the set-to with the Mohawks understand that the prosecutions and especially the non-prosecutions were all politically motivated, and directed by the Ontario A-G.)

It ought to come as no surprise that political control is sometimes exerted on the activities of the Department of Justice and the Attorney-General.  Extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary measures, and the case of SNC-Lavalin is one of those.

SNC-Lavalin is one of Canada’s most important engineering firms, employing over 50,000 people.  It is based in Quebec.  It has a vast reservoir of intellectual capital.  Its existence is in peril as a result of a charge being brought by some overly earnest bureaucrats of the Justice Department who lack political sense.

The charge is of bribing the son of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi in order to obtain a contract.  Bribery to get something done is so common in that part of the world it has a word, baksheesh. The Gadhafi regime is long gone.  Tawdry, yes, and perhaps certain people should be punished.  This happened a decade ago and should be water under the bridge.

But no.  Somebody in Justice wanted to punish Lavalin and Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould lacked the sense to intervene and control the process.  When Justin Trudeau tried to explain the facts of life gently to the Minister, she thought she was being pressured.  When she didn’t get it, he moved her to another portfolio so that someone with more sense could take charge of the file.

There is nothing to be shocked about here, except at how gently it was all handled.  It would be political malpractice for the Prime Minister to countenance the destruction of SNC-Lavalin.  What is surprising is the political naiveté of Jody Wilson-Raybould and that no one suspected there was a political operator behind the mask of “Sunny Ways.”

You just don’t let a major reservoir of intellectual capital in Canada – and based in Quebec to boot - to be destroyed by bureaucratic mindlessness.  That’s why prosecutions are ultimately subject to political control.
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