Democracy does not depend upon Entitlement.

Vincent J. Curtis

23 June 2019

The famous English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton has spoken on the business of what he calls fake subjects and fake disciplines that are proliferating at universities in Europe and North America.  These are characterized by fake scholarship and a fake philosophy that seems to convey authority, enabling people to claim authority for nonsense.  The purpose of that nonsense is to make conformity to orthodoxy the only thing that you have.  If the scholarship is nonsense, the only thing you have are the conclusions, which turn out to be the liberal axioms you started with.  And now to the matter at hand.....

That there even exists a course entitled “Social and Environmental Justice” is proof of the intellectual rot that has set into Canadian academia.  The proliferation of fake subjects and disciplines is worse in the America, and is signified by the course: “fill-in-the-blank-Studies.”

The thesis of Professor James Cairns is that democracy depends upon entitlement.  He cites the case, irrelevant to Canada, of Rosa Parks who refused sit in the back of the bus as required by law in a city of the 1950s deep South.  As an example of entitlement, he asks, “What would have happened if she had given in?”

The short answer is that the civil rights movement would have found someone else.  Rosa Parks was a carefully chosen set up to challenge that law in Federal court.

The general proposition that democracy depends upon entitlement is nonsense, starting with its poor formulation.  And poor formulation is a demonstration of the intellectual poverty of the discipline which offers it.  To begin with, what is meant by ‘democracy?’

And then the word, ‘entitlement.’  Entitlements do not cause democracy – contrary to what the thesis hold.  Canadians have rights and privileges as citizens of this country, but an entitlement refers to something like unemployment insurance and old age security.  Entitlements are things, things that are earned in virtue of something else.  Entitlements have nothing to do with the form of government under which you live.  The German Empire pioneered social entitlements as a means of staving off democracy!

Cairns, with his fake discipline, is hopelessly muddled and the product of his scholarship amounts to nothing more than the prejudices and axioms he started with.
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Up to the ankles in Climate Change

Vincent J. Curtis

26 June 2019

This day the Spectator reported on the damage done to the Lake Ontario shoreline as a result of high water levels in the lake - for the second time in three years.


The Spectator is up to its ankles in evidence of error, and yet it persists in perpetuating the error.  Rising CO2 levels and rising methane levels were supposed to trap more heat in the atmosphere, causing a climate that is warmer and drier.  The Spectator is reporting that Lake Ontario is overflowing because of the unexpectedly cool and wet winter and spring we had.  Oops!

Earlier, the Spectator reported on the problems local farmers were having as a result of the cool and wet winter and spring.  The problems local farmers are having is experience all over North America, and for the same reason: a cool and wet winter.

This wasn’t supposed to be.  The big weather forecasters predicted a warm and dry winter, consistent with the global warming theory.  But that’s not what happened in the actual event.  If climate science were real science, the gap between prediction and actual event would send the scientists back to the drawing board.  But that won’t happen.

Too much politics, too many careers, and too much reputation is invested in the global warming hypothesis – now called climate change on account of the unsustainability of the “warming” hypothesis. Now, rising CO2 is blamed for both hotter and cooler, and for wetter and drier climates, and every bad weather event.

The climate change nonsense would die in an instant the moment it failed to support the progressive political narrative.
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Proportional Representation and Independent Members

Vincent J. Curtis

24 June 2019


As the election of a new Canadian parliament approaches, it is useful to recall a promise made by Liberal leader Justin Trudeau during the last election that set progressive hearts atwitter.  He promised to reform representation in the House of Commons from a member representing a constituency to party representation based on party proportional vote, or proportional representation.

It is hard to tell who were the bigger fools, Trudeau for proposing the thing or progressives for believing him without checking the constitutionality of such a change.

Jody Wilson-Raybold and Jane Philpott remain as members of the House of Commons after being expelled from the Liberal caucus.  Under proportional representation, they (and perhaps the trouble they caused) would have been expelled from the House with their expulsion from the caucus.  Their right to sit in the House would have depended upon their faithful representation of the Liberal party, and the moment they caused trouble, the leader of the party would have the right to replace them with someone who would.  That’s what proportional representation means: no independent members and nothing but faithful party-line votes in the Commons.

If you’re the leader of the party, proportional representation means never having to face a challenge from the ranks.  I don’t think the majority of Canadians are so tied to partisan party interests that they find the idea of an independent member intolerable.

The possibility of Independent membership in the House can make the political show less Soviet-like.
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Canada Declares Climate Emergency

Vincent J. Curtis

19 June 2019


Canada's Minister of Climate Change, Catherine McKenna, is evidently a philosophy drop-out since she doesn’t understand that one cause produces only one effect.  Minister McKenna is pushing the belief that temperatures in Canada are rising as twice the rate of the rest of the world.

I get the theory that rising CO2 traps more heat in the atmosphere, and therefore temperatures should rise.  But the atmosphere being uniform requires temperatures to rise uniformly around the globe in some sense.  That the chunk of the globe called Canada should be rising at twice the rate of the rest means that something other than CO2 is at play.

But what is McKenna’s response?  To double down on CO2 reduction.  Never mind that Canada contributes a mere 1.5 percent of global emissions, and the complete elimination of that won’t matter a whit to CO2 caused global warming.  No, her response is downright Pavlovian.  She can’t even be bothered ask what is causing Canada’s rate to be double, and try to address that cause.

If rising levels of CO2 causes global warming, then the uniformity of the atmosphere requires that increase to be uniform, unless some other causes are at play.  If Canada’s temperatures are rising at double, then some cause other than just CO2 must be at play. Minister McKenna is so religiously fixated on CO2 that’s all she thinks about, and she won’t be rescued by that course in philosophy she missed.
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Australia Declares Climate Emergency

Vincent J. Curtis

22 June 2019


Sydney, Australia declared a climate emergency in a move eerily similar to the one last week by Canada.  From this and other considerations one can draw certain conclusions.

The climate emergency business is being pushed behind the scenes by some political movement.  That hundreds of cities around the world, meaning the English-speaking world, would declare climate emergencies does not happen spontaneously or by accident.

The declaration is nothing but fatuous virtue-signalling.  Australia is a country of 25 million people that contributes 1.0 percent of the world’s annual CO2 emissions.  Like Canada, there is nothing Australia can do to stop the train.


These importunate demands for virtue-signalling is a sign of a religious movement losing confidence in its hold over people.  It thinks that by strenuous re-affirmation of its beliefs that will somehow lead to the action they want.
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Climate Change and Immigration

Vincent J. Curtis

24 June 2019

A few years ago, Dr. Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph, published a work which has interesting implications both on measures to reduce CO2 output and, indirectly, on immigration.

Dr. McKitrick said that the world output of CO2 is 1.15 tons per person per year, and that this figure has been nearly constant since 1970, over forty years ago.  Based on the standard deviation, and taking a five-sigma wide confidence range, Dr. McKitrick concluded that between now and the year 2050 the world output of CO2 emissions will range between 1.0 and 1.3 tons per capita per year.

The implication for Canada is that output depends upon population more than anything else.  Taxes on carbon, cap-and-trade, or any other form of CO2 control will have negligible impact on total national CO2, but population will have significant impact.  More people, more CO2.  Hence, between now and 2050, controlling Canada’s population will be the most effective means of controlling Canada's CO2 emissions.

It is therefore contrary to the goal of controlling Canadian CO2 emissions to have large scale immigration - particularly from countries that lie between 30 degrees North and South latitudes.  This has nothing to do with race, but on the fact that people in tropical latitudes put out less CO2 than those in high latitudes.  And more people living in cold Canada are going to increase Canada’s contribution to world CO2 emissions.  The overall situation is worse if we take in immigrants from the tropical climes.

Canada can’t reduce its CO2 emissions and have high immigration.  Let's see how that plays among progressvies in the next Federal election.
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MMIWG Report Claiming Genocide is Hate Speech

Vincent J. Curtis

19 June 2019


Since hate speech is moving to the front burner of public debate, let’s talk about officially sanctioned and approved hate speech.  I refer to the MMIWG report that concluded white society was responsible for and engaged in a genocide of aboriginal women and girls.

This is hate speech.  Not by the wildest stretches of the imagination can the disappearance and murder of some 1200 people over a span of twenty years, however regrettable these henious crimes are, be classed as a “genocide.”  The murder of six million Jews in four years is a genocide.  The murder of 400,000 Tutsi tribesman in a few weeks is a genocide.   Genocide is the deliberate killing of a large number of people, especially of a particular ethnic group or nation.

The use of the term genocide was not a technical inaccuracy or a mild hyperbole.  It was gross slander.  It was an expression of hatred and anger.  It had no place in a responsible commission report sponsored by the government of Canada.  It was used because the commissioners couldn’t bear to look into the mirror, lest the Medusa of Aboriginal Culture be looking back at them.

I don’t care that the Prime Minister agrees with the use of the term.  It only shows how shameless he is.  (And maybe, if he is presiding, as PM, of a genocide, he should be taken to the International Criminal Court.)

I don’t care if polls show that people tend to agree with the term.  It only shows how detached they are from the ugliness aimed at them.

Banning hate speech starts with banning the report of the MMIWG.
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Hate Speech and Gay Pride violence

Vincent J. Curtis

17 June 2019

Hamilton held a gay pride event at the enormous Gage Park.  People opposed to gay pride also attended and carried signs some of which read, " The wicked shall be cast into hell." and   "Liberal commies and homo fascists are destroying Canada and our children." In addition to bitter words, some push and shoving went on.  All to the displeasure of Hamilton's mayor, Fred Eisenberger, who said that hate speech and violence have no place in Hamilton.

When Mayor Eisenberger says that hate speech and violence have no place in Hamilton, he is only half right.  The Charter protects hate speech.

Hate speech is in the ear of the beholder.  What constitutes hate speech is a matter of opinion.  The Spectator reported word for word in quotes the alleged hate speech, but nobody is accusing the Spectator of engaging in hate speech by reporting it.  And if the words themselves don’t constitute hate speech, then what does?  The flair with which they are spoken?

It is regrettable that the city is caught in the middle of violence that occurred at the gay pride event, but it is a case of reaping what you sow.  Over the strenuous objections of then-Mayor Bob Morrow the city caved to the pressure of the gay lobby and consented to supporting officially the normalization of gay pride.  The lesson taught is that violence and the threat of violence work politically.  If the gay pride event is the product of political pressure, then putting an end to it will require pressure and violence.  The city should have followed Mayor Morrow’s instincts and stayed out of it.

Gay pride will always be controversial because it amounts to an effort to normalize the un-normalizable.  You don’t celebrate the normal, you celebrate something that’s different.  Gay pride events are proof that gays admit to themselves that they are not normal.  Thrusting a lie into the faces of people is inviting trouble.
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Sophomoric Socialists Pledge to Save the Planet from Carbon Catastrophe

Vincent J. Curtis

16 June 2019

At the NDP party conference this weekend, leader Andrea Horwath gave the impression she running for class president.  Playing the ever-popular socialism card, she promised to cut the school’s carbon dioxide emissions by fifty percent!  The applause was so prolonged that she forget to promise ice-cream for all.

Horwath has no idea where this fifty percent cut will come from.  She admits to having no idea how much it’s going to cost.  She has no inkling of the economic dislocation achieving that goal will create.  And she has no concept of the utter futility of the attempt.

It will certainly require a massive increase in government power to direct the economy, and, ironically, “tailored support” for those massive, capital-intensive industries that generate a lot of carbon dioxide.

The utter futility of it all, other than as an electioneering gambit, is that Ontario only contributes about one half of one percent of the world’s emissions of CO2, while China contributes thirty percent, and India seven percent.  Forty percent of the world’s population doesn’t believe in this peculiar western fixation with CO2, and they’re going to be adding scores of gigawatts of thermal coal generated electric power to their grids before 2030.

An Ontario reduction from one half to one quarter of one percent will be swamped by the next Chinese or Indian power plant.

Sackcloth-and-ashes environmentalism won’t save Ontario, and it won’t even save Andrea’s immortal soul.
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Is your Environmentalist a Philosophy Drop-out?

Vincent J. Curtis

15 June 2019

How many philosophy drop-outs are there?  It’s pretty much “settled science” in philosophy that a single cause produces a single effect.  All the laws of science rely on it, and a good number of them are restatements of this principle in disguise.

Within a week, the Hamilton Spectator, my hometown newspaper, published an article in which an "expert" asserted that the wildfires in Alberta earlier this spring was “climate change in action.”

An unusually hot and dry winter apparently caused by high CO2 levels left Alberta forests tinder dry, and those fires were a consequence of CO2 induced climate change.  Then comes the report today that an unusually cool and wet winter and spring are making the planting of crops a real problem for Hamilton farmers.  Indeed, this is a problem across most of farm country in North America.

So which is it?  Hot and dry produces dry forests or cold and wet making crop planting difficult?

Different effects are produced by different causes.  Rising CO2 levels can cause one or the other but not both.  Climate “change” cannot be both hotter and colder and drier and wetter at the same time.  To say otherwise is either to admit the existence of other causes or to deny a fundamental principle of logic and science.

When someone claims that this or that is due to climate change, you know you are in the presence of a philosophy drop-out.
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NDP can't rid itself of Marxism

Vincent J. Curtis

14 June 2019


Andrew Dreschel reports that NDP leader Andrea Horwath is “excited about building ‘resistance’ to the Ford government’s agenda.”  The rest of us ought to find her excitement disappointing and even alarming.

It comes as no surprise than an NDP leader would espouse a typically Marxian approach to politics.  And so long as they are far from power, that’s no real harm.  But this tedious aping of American style of politics also imports the worst of American politics.

Horwath is the leader of the “loyal opposition,’ not a resistance leader.  The duty of the opposition is to oppose, but the loyal part means that she recognizes the right of the government to govern.  “Resistance” involves a denial of the legitimate right of the government to govern.  Opposition means criticism and perhaps the offering of constructive alternatives.  “Resistance” means the encouragement of disorder.  Disorder for thee, but the New Order for me is what “resistance” by one side amounts to.

“Resistance” is a policy that can’t work if both sides engage in it.  If both sides regard each other as morally illegitimate without a right to govern despite an electoral mandate, there can’t be reasonable government or civil peace.

“Resistance” ultimately is a policy that is contrary to peaceful democracy.  But, of course, Marxism itself is contrary to democracy and believes in revolution.

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Trudeau to ban single-use plastic items

Vincent J. Curtis

11 June 2019

At first blush, the banning of plastic straws, Styrofoam cups, and plastic grocery bags seems like a bagatelle.  But on second thought, you have to wonder what is going on?

How does municipal waste from Canada end up in the ocean off China?

The answer is that Canada relies on the corrupt practices of third world countries to deal with a problem we ought to solve ourselves.  By banning certain plastic items, Trudeau is confirming us in the practice of dumping our garbage in the third world.

Single use plastics are used for reasons of public health, and so Trudeau picked one of the dumbest ways of addressing the problem of our waste off China’s coast.  He should ban or heavily tax the export of our municipal waste.

Canada has the wealth, space, and technology to dispose of our own waste, but we lack the will to do so.  Rather than confront Canadians with the problem we have to solve honorably ourselves, Trudeau takes an easy and unhealthy way out.
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Are Forest Fires Climate Change in Action?

Vincent J. Curtis

10 June 2019

Canadian Press reports on a report from some environmental action group that the forest fires that occured in northern Alberta just a few weeks ago was "cliamte change in action."


The claim of climate change that deserves to be exposed as extreme is the story that a recent forest fire in northern Alberta is “climate change in action.”  To see how extreme the claim is doesn’t requires detailed knowledge of science.

A forest is not a kind of climate; and hence a forest fire simply cannot be a change of climate in action.  Right away, we can see that “forest fire equals climate change” is far-fetched reasoning.  (far-fetched used here is a term of art in philosophy.)

The scientist said that “we burn about 2.5 million hectares a year on average - that’s using about a ten year average”    If climate change caused more forest to burn, then he wouldn’t have mentioned an average, but rather a continual uptrend.  An average implies a standard deviation, meaning some years more and some years less centered about a mean.  It simply isn’t scientific to say that a particular forest fire in a sign of climate change, especially when the fire season isn’t over and we don’t know yet how many hectares burned, and where that amount fits in the expected range.

The scientist then says that 2.5 million is more than double the average of the 1960’s and ‘70s, when Alberta’s forests were forty and fifty years younger.  The worst period we know of, however, was during the “dirty ‘30s” when the climate was extremely hot and dry, and the means of fighting forest fires were much less than today.

I‘m hearing a cry for another research grant.
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A Fantasist's View of Hamilton

Vincent J. Curtis

6 June 2019

The Hamilton Spectator published an article by someone who proclaimed to see from the top of the Kenilworth steps a dry, lifeless desert before him that will occur within the lifetime of his young son.  For those unfamiliar with Hamilton, the Kenilworth steps lead to the top of Hamilton's escarpment and affords an excellent view of the Red Hill valley, the east end of the city, Hamilton Bay, and the vast Lake Ontario, which stretches to the horizon.  Lake Ontario is overflowing its shores again this year due to heavy rainfall in the Great Lakes watershed.


The author, a professor of social and environmental justice, did not actually look from the top of the Kenilworth steps.  If he had, he would have seen a massive Lake Ontario overflowing its banks for the second time in three years, after experiencing one of the coolest and wettest winters on record.

Does he really believe that within the lifetime of his son, the city will be a sun-baked ruin devoid of life?  Lake Ontario will have completely disappeared?  (I’ll take that bet!)  The city under the trees will be void of life, and humanity almost extinct?

Asseverating dystopian nightmares in no way adds to an intelligent discussion about facts, because nightmares aren’t facts or reason.  What we have here is another case of an Arts major who has more confidence in his grasp of science than actual scientists do.

Professors of social and environmental justice may not be given to squatting in the lotus position and humming, but that would be more sensible than looking at Lake Ontario today and believing a desert will lie there in forty years.
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Gay Pride losing its cool factor?

Vincent J. Curtis

3 June 2019


The offical representative of the gay community of Hamilton refused to participate in the ceremonial raising of the gay pride flag over city hall, and published half-heatered excuses why.  The excuses offered for why the LGBTQWERTY+2 movement opposed the gay pride flag raising over city hall – symbolizing triumph – are simply words to cover a deeper cause.  As is true of environmentalism, so it is true of the gay pride movement, so it is true of every Marxist movement, it is simply not in their nature to be satisfied.

The purpose of every Marxist movement is to sow disorder.  If order gets restored by compromise, then some new excuse is needed to recreate disorder.  With Marxist movements, the issue is never the issue, the issue is power.  The method is disorder for thee, and the New Order for me.

The perfunctory acceptance of it made gay pride conventional.  That took the fun out of thrusting gay pride into the faces of straight society.  The gay pride parade in Toronto is cancelled because the Toronto police and a host of other straight organizations looking to win political correctness points got so involved that the parade was no longer a form of protest.

The point of flaunting gayness is to be shocking, and to demand acceptance of the unconventional is to humiliate the straight society.  But now gayness is blasé, commonplace, even tedious.  The ritual self-abasement of straight society is now boring.

Opposing the flag raising is simply a desperate way of keeping the pot of discontent boiling.
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D-Day on Juno Beach

A Day of Missed Opportunities

Vincent J. Curtis

21 Apr 2019

In June we celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of D-Day, regarded as the beginning of the end of the Nazi regime.  The greatest success that day, in terms of ground gained and objectives met, was by the Canadians coming off Juno beach.

Nevertheless, a close study of the movement off Juno leaves one with the impression of opportunities lost on account of failures of leadership.

The senior Canadian leadership of World War I were militia officers, civilian professional men, who had not commanded anything above a battalion before the war.  They reached Corps and Division command on account of proven worth.  They had no preconceptions about how war should be fought.  They learned from Julian Byng the value of battle studies, and of applying the lessons learned (and adding new wrinkles of your own like sound-ranging) to the next battle.  That’s why Vimy Ridge was such an astonishing success.

Prior to D-Day, the allies had landed in Sicily, Italy, and Anzio.  The Sicily invasion went well in part because the commander of the American forces, the audacious Lt-Gen George S. Patton, Jr., exploded off the beaches.  He wanted to beat Montgomery to Messina, and he wasn’t going to do it “protecting Monty’s left flank” through the central mountains of Sicily.  Patton immediately sent a “reconnaissance in force” in the direction of Palermo, creating space and confusion, and got there practically unopposed.

The failure was at Anzio.  The landings caught the Germans completely by surprise.  The road lay open to Rome and to the complete dislocation of the German Winter Line - had the landing force moved off the beaches.  But no.  Maj-Gen John Lucas had to establish and consolidate first, and the resulting delay gave Kesselring time to react.  He blocked movement off the beaches for four months.

Such were the lessons.  Another lesson ought to have been known.  The French military theorist Ardant du Picq taught that a small force cannot afford to get involved in a melee because in a melee its organization, the real strength of the force, is lost.

In practical terms, this means that a superior attacking force can afford to by-pass pockets of resistance because doing so involves the defence in a melee.  None of the lessons, of the importance of gaining space rapidly, of the value of by-passing small pockets of resistance, of closest infantry-tank coordination were applied by the Canadian commanders on D-Day.

The objective in the Commonwealth sector on D-Day was the capture of Caen.  The Canadian landings began at 08:00 hours, but not until 14:30 was the beach deemed secure and movement inland ordered by Major General Rod Keller, Commander of the Canadian 3^rd Division.  The advance would not last long nor go far.

A troop of Sherman tanks, No. 2 Troop, C Squadron, 1^st Hussars, led by Lieutenant William F. McCormick, nevertheless did their job.  They found an unopposed route from Camilly on Phase Line Elm all the way to the objective: Phase Line Oak – the Caen-Bayeux rail line and the Carpiquet airfield.  Despite frantic signalling, McCormick was not reinforced.  Where was his Squadron Commander?  His Regiment Commander?  Why wasn’t anyone wondering where their lost Troop was? And why were the Canadians digging in back at Phase Line Elm with four hours of daylight remaining and an open road ahead?

They were digging on order from British Lieutenant General Miles Dempsey because the British 3^rd Division on Sword was being attacked in flank by elements of the German 21^st Panzer Division.  Three divisions halted because one of them was counterattacked.  The Canadian 9^th Brigade halted three miles from Caen, the farthest inland of any allied force.  The rest of the day was wasted.  In the night the Germans moved in the 12^th SS Panzer Division (Hitlerjugend) and then the Panzer Lehr Division.  Caen wasn’t captured until a month later.

Many life-saving opportunities created by surprise that day went unexploited from a lack of Patton-esque audacity on the part of senior Canadian leadership.
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