Singh call for Electoral Reform

Vincent J. Curtis

24 Oct 2019


It didn’t take long for disaffected losers to raise the tattered flag of electoral reform above ramparts shattered in the recent election.  NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is waving it desperately to deflect attention from his party’s poor performance under his leadership.

In Vancouver Granville, the electorate chose Jody Wilson-Raybould as their Independent representative in the new parliament.  Under Mr. Singh’s tired and refuted plan of proportional representation, he would have to say to the people of Vancouver Granville that their choice and decision doesn’t matter.  JWR wasn’t selected by a party leader and so she can’t represent you.  Your preference doesn’t matter in the larger scheme of things.

Such is democracy under proportional representation.

Except to save his own political skin, there really is no excuse to call for proportional representation.  Mr. Trudeau promised it in 2015 and struggled mightily to bring it about, but failed.  In the first place, a constitutional convention would have to be called, and there simply was strong resistance against it across Canada.  Wasn’t Mr. Singh paying attention?

Mr. Trudeau today is thankful he failed.  Not a peep from him.  He’s learned his lesson.
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Hillary Smears Gabbard

Vincent J. Curtis

19 Oct 2019


This week, Hillary Clinton openly smeared Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), a candidate for the Democratic presidential nominee.  Hillary claimed Gabbard was being “groomed” to be a “Russian asset.”  Hillary also accused the 2016 Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein of being a Russian asset.  Let’s examine these explosive accusations both in their substance and in a wider political context.

During the Whitewater Investigation, when Hillary’s husband, Bill Clinton, was president, New York Times columnist William Safire concluded that Hillary Clinton was a pathological liar.  I share that opinion, and do not for a moment believe Hillary’s latest outrages against truth.

The entire smear against Gabbard is that she is “being groomed” to be a Russian “asset.”  The being groomed aspect is intended to be worse than a patronizing putdown.  Children are groomed.  Gabbard is a mature woman, old enough to run for president.  Grooming in the sense implied by Hillary is reserved for a child – one being groomed for sexual abuse.  While one sense of grooming could be used in the case of an adult, as when, for example,  a general is being groomed to become a chief of staff, it means a favored person is given experience necessary for the top job.  By no means does Hillary imply that the Russians are giving Gabbard experience to become an asset of theirs.  The being groomed part of the smear is simply to make the false accusation that follows more vicious and personal, giving a whiff of sexual perversity.

The choice of the term asset is somewhat clever.  The obvious alternative would be “agent,” but the use of asset instead makes the accusation more slippery.  An agent is someone who is acting on behalf of, or is employed for the purpose of, gaining a benefit for the person who hired the agent.  A spy can clearly be an agent.  But an agent knows that he is operating to confer benefits onto someone else  Hillary wants to imply that Gabbard may not even be aware that she is going to benefit Russia in some unspecified way, making the charge harder to dispute.

Hence, grooming and asset together mean that Gabbard may not yet be of value to Russia, and she may not even be aware that she is going to become one in some unspecified way.

An asset is not necessarily an agent.  Anything of permanent value can be an asset.  For example, Hillary permitted the transfer of twenty percent of American uranium reserves to a Russian company, for which she received indirectly $145 million.  Those reserves are now an asset of Russia.  So by calling Gabbard an asset Hillary means in a vague and undefined way that Gabbard is going to become something of value to Russia, though in what way is left tantalizingly unclear.

The “grooming to be a Russian asset” against Gabbard is an example of the Clintonian method of smearing – vicious, diabolical, and vague enough not to be immediately dismissible.

Hillary may have gone to the well too often in making this smear promiscuously against Gabbard, Jill Stein and Donald Trump - of being assets of Russian president Vladimir Putin.  The Russia hoax against Trump lasted three years before it finally ran out of gas due to utter lack of evidence.  Hillary ought to be jailed for hoaxing America like she did, but without doubt she will get away scot-free.

The media response is, to say the least, strange.  The media have heard the same charge from the same source before.  No one asked Hillary obvious questions: “how do you know this?”  “Who told you?”  “How is this taking place?  If asked, Hillary would squirt a load of ink into the water and try to slink away amid vague insinuations of insider insight.  She couldn’t say that Fusion GPS told her, or that a former British spy named Christopher Steele did a study for her.  That would give the game away, and undermine the impeachment of Donald Trump.

Gabbard served on the board of the DNC during the 2016 nomination, and she discovered that the DNC was applying pressure to ensure that Hillary won the nomination over Bernie Sanders.  Gabbard resigned the board and endorsed Sanders.  Hillary’s smear is straightforward revenge for that “betrayal,” though we still don’t know why now?

The real question is why the media are giving it the currency they are.  Why are they taking this absurd charge from a known pathological liar seriously?  Why aren’t they piling on Hillary for a smear she can’t back up?

Do Hillary and Bill Clinton still possess a hypnotic power over the Main Stream Media?
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Genetics Condemns Darwinism

Vincent J. Curtis

13 Oct 2019

(This is an edited text of a note I sent to Dr. Edward Feser, author of the book Aristotle's Revenge.)


Biology has no explanation for speciation, and the problem of explaining evolution is an insuperable one for biology.

The very existence of an empirical science of genetics condemns Darwinism.  That genetics can be an empirical science with predictive powers requires a high degree of faithfulness in the transmission of genetic information from one generation to the next.  Geneticists would be astonished and alarmed if a flock of chickens bred to produce white eggs would have one hen that faithfully produced a purple one.  (Long story, the hen that produced them was genetically of the grandparent generation.)  A biologist would be shocked if an egg produced by a chicken hatched an eagle.  All the dog breeding experiments over hundreds of years have only ever produced dogs, never a cat or even a wolf.  The teleology all points to faithful reproduction.

Then there is the problem of directedness of evolution.  Why only upward and why only occasionally?   Why aren’t apes spontaneously and to this day occasionally giving birth to proto-humans?  It was started once, a few million years ago and never done since - why?  (Was it a miracle?) There have been over 7 billion humans born since 1900, so why have we not seen either a higher state human or a retrocession into a more primitive type like Peking man?

Even with simple life like viruses, we hear of new strains of influenza – but these still produce influence, not meningitis.

The principle of biology that “like begets like” seems to hold – like a principle of science!  There seems no room for evolution in the manner of genetic mechanics.  All the teleology points to faithful transmission of genetic information from one generation to the next.

A problem for philosophy is to identify the thing in which the evolutionary change occurs: not in the parents, and the offspring is what it is from the moment it comes to be.  So, it can’t be said to be the offspring that changed. (The offspring is a different substance from the parents)  And it can’t be the species because a species exists in its membership.  So there is a problem identifying in exactly what evolutionary change occurs.

In his book, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes, Mortimer J. Adler goes through all the philosophical failings of biology in trying to explain how rational man could evolve from non-rational, primitive apes.

It’s a wonder how Darwinism even persists as a theory apart from the atheism it seems to support.  Although Aquinas allowed for evolution, I think all we have that’s tenable is a theist theory.  The teleology points to faithful transmission of information and it would take some kind of external (miraculous, since it occurs only once) intervention to change the course of natural teleology.


P.S. I’m open to biology solving its problems without recourse to theism, but as a chemist I get some satisfaction at watching Darwinists sputter when challenged.  They seem to know it’s B.S., but it’s all they’ve got.
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Closing the Gap

Vincent J. Curtis

1 July 2019


Operation Tractable kinda-sorta ended on Aug 16^th, 1944, with the capture of Falaise by 2^nd Div. But the gap wasn’t closed.

On the 16^th, the 4^th Div and the 1^st Polish Armoured Division were ordered to take Trun and link up with the American 3^rd Army at Chambois.  The 1^st Polish outflanked the German defenses and, dividing itself into three battle groups, sent one to Chambois, one to Hill 262 (Mont Ormel), and another to the south of Trun, easing the its capture on the 18^th by 4^th Div.

The gap, about four miles wide and through which the German 7^th Army had to pass, was spanned by the Dives River.  The Dives formed an impassable barrier to vehicular traffic except at two points, Moissy and St. Lambert-sur-Dives.  The hamlet of Moissy had a ford, led to by a single lane dirt track; next to it was a narrow foot bridge.

St. Lambert, a village of 150 souls, had a two-lane bridge that was strong enough to support a Panther tank.  The gap area was flat, wide-open, and easily observed from the heights around Trun, ideal killing ground for artillery and Typhoons.

Capturing Trun, the 4^th Div was nearly spent, but did send a battle group forward to seize St. Lambert.  The battle group comprised B and C Coys of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, about fifty men each, and C Squadron of the South Alberta Regiment, the armoured recce unit of 4^th Div.  In overall command was Major David Currie of the SAR.  The task of Currie Force was to stop the passage of 100,000 Germans.

Backstopping the Dives position, three miles to the east were two Polish battlegroups on Hill 262.  They had with them Capt Pierre Sevigny an artillery FOO for the 58^th Bty, 4^th Medium Regiment.  After crossing the Dives, escaping Germans had to pass around Hill 262, and the Poles scourged them with tank and small arms fire as well as Sevigny’s artillery fire.  Over the 36 hours from the 20^th to 21^st August, Capt Sevigny was to win Poland’s highest military decoration, the Virtuti Militari.  His work inflicted thousands of casualties on the Germans and enabled the Poles to hold out against German attacks trying to re-open the gap.  Four depleted SS Panzer divisions east of the Dives repeatedly attacked the Poles, who fought them until they ran out of ammunition - and then fought them hand-to-hand. 

Currie Force approached St. Lambert at dusk on the 19^th - and was repulsed with the loss of two of its fifteen Shermans.  Pulling back 1,000 yards, Currie used the night to personally recce the defenses.  Attacking again at dawn, Currie Force gained half the village by noon, forming another gauntlet escaping Germans had to pass.  Currie Force repulsed repeated counterattacks, and near dusk surged ahead to capture the rest of the village.

As the battle progressed, columns of death began to sprout from the choke points   The corpses of men, horses (Wehrmacht transport was still largely horse-drawn) wrecked vehicles, artillery pieces, trucks and tanks were piling up along the roads, choking passage even more.

Discipline in the Wehrmacht began to crack.  Prisoners were being taken first by the dozen, then fifty and then a hundred at a time.  Pte E.H. McAllister of the Argylls was credited with capturing 160 men.  The famous picture of David Currie winning his VC shows a German officer surrendering to Argyll George Mitchell, CSM of C Coy, with Pte John Evans off to the right.  (A moment after the picture was taken, Mitchell buttstroked the Officer for looking arrogant.)

Before noon on the 21^st, 4^th Div pushed ahead from Trun, with the Canadian Grenadier Guards relieving the Poles.  Over 50,000 were trapped, and the German 7^th Army surrendered, Paris was liberated three days later.

For several feats of personal military prowess, his skillful and determined attacks and defense, and for demonstrating an epic coolness under fire for 36 hours, Major David Vivian Currie was awarded the Victoria Cross.
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