Pandemic isn't hype, but it's being hyped

 Vincent J. Curtis

29 Dec 20

RE: Pandemic not hype, people are dying. A report by the Canadian Press of this date.

After ten months of hyping the pandemic story, it’s getting harder to take these reports seriously any more.  Of course people are dying.  In a typical ten month period, Canada experiences 217,000 deaths from all causes.  Being the cause of death for 15,000 places CHICOM-19 about fifth down the list of all causes.

What also is being neglected in the report is that 82 percent of the deaths are among people aged 80 or older.  This is important because it goes to the heart of the shutdown logic: young people have to be put out of work and we all have to wear useless masks because somebody’s grandma will die otherwise.

These 15,000 didn’t all happen in a rush.  The first 5,000 came in the first two months of the first wave.  It took another five months for the next 5,000 to die, and two months more saw another 5,000.  Why are we letting so-called medical experts rule the economy when they have so incompetently managed health care?  Weren’t they supposed to have perfected the methods of slowing the spread?  They had plenty of time to work out the techniques!

Perhaps we should admit that the experts are floundering and lost, and that the problem is not nearly as bad as made out.  The pandemic isn’t nothing, but it isn’t as earth-shattering as is being hyped.

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Brexit: There will always be an England

 Vincent J. Curtis

29 Dec 20

RE: Great Britain less great.  Spectator editorial of this date.  Another silly globalist argument.

“Sovereignty is best assured by the European nations pooling their strength and speaking together,” says European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.  Nothing could be less sensible to English ears than statements like this one.

In the first place, it is not an English voice that is speaking, its German; and the ‘von’ particularly sticks in the throat of the English.  The English are not used to Germans, French, Belgians, Luxembourgers, or anyone else speaking in their name.  The idea that English sovereignty is best assured by surrendering it to a European commission is preposterous.

Twice in the 20th century, Great Britain saved the continent from a ‘von’ Something or Other, and commands (never mind blandishments) about surrendering her sovereignty to a European authority has been heard and rejected since the days of the Spanish Armada.

 The European Union idea was conceived by Winston Churchill as a way for France to lead Germany back to the comity of nations.  Never was Britain to become a part of it.  He knew Europe, but he also knew Britain, with her long tradition of Common Law, her distrust of overweening authority and political theories, and pride in her independence.  Britain withdrew from something she should never have entered.

By withdrawing, Britain is being true to herself and continues the English story.

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Where are the studies proving lockdowns work?

Vincent J. Curtis

28 Dec 20

After nearly ten months, you’d think we'd be flooded with studies showing the efficacy of lockdown measures.  Which ones work, and which ones don’t help at all.  We’re constantly told about “the science,” well, where are the studies proving the hypotheses of the spring actually worked in practice?

There aren’t any! In April, a study (co-authored by Dr. Scott Atlas) was issued that showed that after two weeks, lockdowns begin to act perversely, causing the loss of more life-years than saved by preventing transmission of the virus.  This was borne out tragically in British Columbia, where the excess deaths from drug overdoses alone are almost double the deaths from COVID-19.  Otherwise, there have been no studies that prove that closing or restricting bars and restaurants, fitness clubs, barbershops, hair salons, parks and outdoor facilities, the visiting of family, etc. actually does anything significant in reducing transmission.

We are justified in expecting quantitative results, as the April study was.  Science is supposed to be provable, and, in the case at hand, quantifiable.  But the people telling us that we can’t group in sizes larger than five, have yet to provide either the math or the studies which justify their allegedly scientific conclusions.

Looking at the cases curve, I see no proof that lockdowns did anything to change the course of the pandemic.  In fact, it appears that lockdowns tend to promote transmission, at least initially.  This rise of 23 % that occurred in Hamilton, ON, over the last five days, occurs as people begin lockdown in “grey zone” tightness.

How long will the media tolerate hand-waving by the health people before they demand to see the details of how their draconian control decisions were reached?

Neil Ferguson was exposed as an academic fraud not by challenging his pandemic forecasts, but because he was caught visiting his mistress in defiance of his own “scientific” advice.  But we’re still doing the lockdowns he designed!!

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Weird Voting in Arizona

Vincent J. Curtis

27 Dec 20

The State of Arizona shows the same weird voting patterns of other states thus far analyzed: a surge of vote for Donald Trump but an even larger surge of votes for Joe Biden; a surge outside any reasonable norm.  Of course, this gives rise to the question of voter fraud, separate from the shenanigans of the vote count which itself raised alarms of fraud.

Let’s look at the voting pattern in Arizona since 2008:

Arizona           2008       2012       2016       2020

Democrat 1,034707             930,664     1,161,167     1,672,199

Republican 1,230,111         1,143,051     1,252,401     1,661,686

In 2008 and 2012, the Democratic candidate was Barack Obama, then shiny, new, unknown, but charismatic, promising hope and change, and whose election offered the prospect of ridding America of the albatross of racism and slavery.  In 2012, Obama, scuffed up from four years in office, enthusiasm for him waning across the country; nevertheless, won in 2012 also, albeit with a reduced vote total.  That reduced total is reflected in 2012.

In 2008, Arizona’s senior Senator John McCain was the Republican flag bearer.  He was as well-known as any politician can be in his state.  Though a war hero, he was scuffed up from three decades in office and his health was questioned.  Nevertheless, Arizona was more skeptical of Obama than she was of her own Senator, and McCain carried the state by 200,000 votes.  In 2012, Mitt Romney carried the Republican banner, and was endorsed by his predecessor in the role, John McCain.  Reflecting the general lesser enthusiasm across the board for the presidential election, Romney carried Arizona with a lower vote total than McCain, but a slightly larger plurality, 210,000 votes, over Obama than McCain got in 2008.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton bested Barack Obama’s 2008 vote count by 130,000 votes.  She did better than Romney did in 2012.  Clinton, if elected would have been the first woman president in American history.  Like Obama, she was an extreme progressive.   She was everything the progressive Left could ask for.  However, Donald Trump, the Republican standard-bearer, did better than McCain did in 2008 by 20,000 votes, and carried the state over Clinton by 90,000 votes.

In 2016, Fox News called Arizona for Trump very late in the evening, and other networks didn’t call Arizona even by the next morning, so close was the race considered to be.  However, in 2020, Fox News called Arizona early, with only twelve percent of the vote in.  This was strange, as the final vote count 2020 was much, much closer than it was in 2016.

In 2020, Trump dramatically increased the Republican vote total, surpassing his 2016 height by 410,000 votes, or 33 percent.  But Joe Biden increased the Democrat vote total by 510,000 votes, eclipsing Hillary’s 2016 height by 44 percent.

The population of Arizona has been slowly increasing, which might explain the higher total count, but when one candidate increases his count by 33 percent, some of that increase usually comes at the expense of the opposing candidate.  In this case, it didn’t.  Joe Biden found a well of over half a million new Democrat voters, Democrat voters who were indifferent to Obama and Clinton.

Joe Biden didn’t campaign in Arizona.  He had not the charisma of Obama, or the glamor of Clinton.  He was the quintessential old, white, insider, establishment male who was put up because Bernie Sanders was too radical.  Meanwhile, Trump campaigned extensively in Arizona, and held a massive, 50,000 person rally in Bullhead City less than a week before the election.  Trump’s internal polling showed him carrying the state.  Yet, mysteriously, 510,000 new Democrat voters appeared out of nowhere to vote for Biden.  About 920,000 new voters cast their ballots for the first time in Arizona in 2020.

I get that Trump is polarizing; that he can create as much opposition as he does support, but the vote in Arizona is asking us to believe that he created even more opposition than additional support, and that greater enthusiasm in opposition caused him to lose the state to a cypher carrying the Democrat label.

Given Trump’s much larger total the second time around – in contrast to Obama’s drop the second time around – all Biden’s 510,000 additional votes were cast not for him but in opposition to Trump.  This does not give Biden any kind of mandate, given that he didn’t campaign and kept his platform ambiguous.

A weird vote in Arizona.

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Some science on masking and exercise

Vincent J. Curtis

26 Dec 20

RE: Masking on the Chedoke Stairs.  Letter to the editor, Spectator of this date.  In my younger days, I used the run the Chedoke stairs.  It is a 2 person wide set of steel stairs that run between Scenic Park and the Chedoke Golf Course at the top and bottom respectively of the Hamilton escarpment.  Scenic Park is a small park that lies at the foot of Upper Paradise Street at Scenic Drive on Hamilton's West Mountain.  It is often used by people for cardio exercise.  Steve Warrick of Ancaster takes exception to people who exercise on the stairs not wearing masks.

Whenever I read letters like Mr. Warrick’s, I better understand how a tenth of the East German population became informants for the Stasi, East Germany’s notorious secret police.

Mr. Warrick expressed concern that people running the Chedoke stairs for fitness weren’t wearing masks, and therefore placed people like him at risk of catching COVID-19.  They weren’t conforming, and he wasn’t happy about it.

I know this is a little complicated, but follow me here.  There are no scientific studies that demonstrate a measurable degree of transmission prevention of viral diseases by the use of surgical masks.  And there won’t ever be until an organization like ASTM comes up with a test protocol.  And they won’t because real-world use of surgical masks is too uncontrollable for a test procedure to provide meaningful, quantitative results.  The urgency to wear surgical masks comes from the perception that some masking is better than nothing, not from quantitative scientific testing.

Physical distancing outdoors with minimal interaction between people has kinda, sorta been shown quasi-scientifically to reduce transmission probabilities.  Running the Chedoke stairs would be a test case of this scenario.  But since transmission probabilities are the point at issue, let’s look at them.

With 1,000 active cases in Hamilton, the chances of the next person you encounter is contagious is one in five hundred.  The thirty people running the stairs are all youngish and healthy.  That would include Mr. Warrick.  Contagious people don’t feel well enough to run stairs, especially since the virus affects breathing.  In short, people running the stair are self-selected healthy people, not contagious people.  And if no virus is present, no virus can be transmitted.  There are greater probabilities of Mr. Warrick hurting himself on the stairs in some other way than getting infected, and so his concern is wrongly placed.

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Climate crazies still huffing and puffing

Vincent J. Curtis

24 Dec 20

RE: Roadblocks on the road to zero emissions.  Hamilton Spectator op-ed of this date, writtne by Robert Hicks.  Mr. Hicks works at the McMaster University branch of OPIRG, the Ontario Public Interest Research Group, a left-wing "research" group that has been around since at least the 1970s.  I don't know what Mr. Hicks' scientific specialty is, but he positively rhapsodized about mathematics being the "music of reason."  Actually, theoretical science, to the extent it can, tries to mathematize its laws in summary of empirical results.  I suspect Mr. Hicks is not into the philosophy of science, and so lacks this precision of understanding.  Nevertheless, handwaving about the beauty of math is supposed to provide support for his thesis, that the world is going to hell in a handbasket after the year 2030 unless we stop emitting carbon now!.  That 'we' being Canada specifically, but the western world generally.  Did I say that OPRIG was left-wing?  Below is an answer to the op-ed.

Robert Hicks can rhapsodize all he likes about mathematics being “the music of reason,” but here are a couple other turns of reason concerning math: figures can lie and liars can figure.  Another is GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.

The year 2030 has become significant in the minds of the climate crazies because they believe it to be the year when the earth reaches a climatic precipice, and the earth will accelerate into Venus-like conditions.  Except, it won’t. (Remember AOC and the 12 years to disaster?  "this is our World War 2!" she said.)

Actually, the year 2030 is the year set in the Paris Climate Accord when underdeveloped countries like China and India will cease being permitted to raise the amount of CO2 they emit as much as they want.  China and India are two large countries building coal-fired power plants as quickly as they can.  In 2030, they are supposed to follow limits.

Nevertheless, the IPCC, which remains the gold standard of climate craziness, wants mankind to prevent global climatic temperatures from rising above 1.5℃ by 2101, eighty years hence.  Trouble is, none of the climate models are any good.  (With experience of pandemic modelling, are we surprised?)  Satellite measurements show that the atmosphere rose in temperature between 1979 and 2019 by 0.13℃ per decade, and so will be on track for 1.5℃ rise by the end of the 21st century.  Unless the trend reverses, as reverse it did twice in the 20th century.

Rhapsodize about math, but the empirical results are what matter.

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Doug Ford Just Lied

Vincent J. Curtis

21 Dec 20

With a serious look in his face and gravity in his voice, Doug Ford lied like hell to Ontarians, and the sad part is, he probably didn’t realize it.

Ford declared that the shutdown of Ontario would last fourteen days in Northern Ontario and 28 days in the south.  He called this “a temporary but one time measure.”  He later said that Dr. Williams and his staff would keep a close eye on the data to determine what the data tells them, and whether it is safe to lift any restrictions or they need to be extended. 

Okay, so the business about 28 days didn’t really mean 28 days, maybe longer.  Depends on the data.  That, in turn, means the part about ‘temporary’ and ‘one time’ was up for grabs also.

Back in March, we were told about a fifteen day lockdown.  That lasted for six weeks before the most ridiculous of the measures were lifted; and it wasn’t until June that measures were eased a little more.  That easing came after the George Floyd demonstrations made a mockery of social distancing, among other things.  Political demonstrations were okay, but going to church was not.

Ford lied about promising a duration, and the one-time bit.  He was sincere about his reason: in order to save the hospitals.  Surrounded by medical professionals for whom the health care system is everything, Ford had no other proposals as higher ends means than saving hospitals by means of locking everyone away in their residences.  This one-time temporary measure is to save the hospitals, which also needed saving in the spring.  Remember “flattening the curve?” What if they need saving again in early March?  Ford’s promise of a one-time temporary shutdown is contingent upon hospitals not needing to be saved again, and so his promise of one-time and temporary is a lie.

Instead of COVID having higher priority than heart attacks, why not reverse that order?  Just an example!  And whoever said a functioning hospital system in Toronto took higher priority than the economy that supports it?

Ford is in over his head, and he is getting bad advice.  He lied in his announcement and didn’t even know it.  Ford needs to resign now.  Unfortunately, there isn’t anyone in caucus with the education and brainpower to try something different and ignore all the bad advice.

You get the government you deserve!

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Humor for the climate crazies.

Vincent J. Curtis

19 Dec 20

RE: Trudeau not serious about climate.  Hamilton Spectator letter to the editor of this date.  All the apocalyptic images were invoked: the planet is under existential threat, 2030, etc.  A little humor would probably cause Mr. Yates's head to explode.  So, humor he got.

Robert Yates takes an entirely too pessimistic view of things.  The world civilization isn’t addicted to oil, because there is no such thing as a world civilization.  The third rock from the sun has been in orbit for four billion years and will continue in orbit for a few billion more regardless of what the life that’s on it does or doesn’t do.  It is not under existential threat from us.

I take particular exception to his reference to Alberta’s “filthy” tarsands.  Sensitive Albertans are aware of their “filthy” tarsands, and they’re trying their best to do something about it.  They’re digging it up, and shipping it to Ontario, the United States, and hopefully soon to China, for disposal.  The preferred method of disposal is combustion.

In a century or two Alberta will have rid itself of these filthy tarsands, thanks to the folks in Ontario and elsewhere.  Besides beautification, Alberta benefits in two other ways.  The first is that the CO2 produced by combustion in Ontario is free food for the bounteous plant life that grows in Alberta, such as trees, prairie grass, wheat, and canola.  The second is that Ontario actually pays to burn the stuff.

So, let’s help keep Alberta beautiful, green, and in the green.  Help Alberta rid itself of filthy tarsands, Ontario!  It’s the Canadian thing to do!

That’s the positive way of looking at the matter.

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The calamitous failure of the experts

 Vincent J. Curtis

20 Dec 20

RE: Ontario Planning New Restrictions

Even more restrictions is an admission of utter failure of the ruling elite class of “experts”; an inability to see trends in data, and an utter failure in imagination.  It ought to be profoundly embarrassing to a Conservative government to model COVID restrictions after those of the Communist Party of China.  Doug Ford is treating Ontarians like China treats its Uighurs.

Actually, Uighurs are better treated.  Ontarian gets the re-education camp treatment, but without the social contact.

Ever since masks became mandated, each successive turn of the screw has produced more cases, not less.  Restrictions are supposed to reduce the incidence of COVID, but instead we always seem to get more cases.  This means either the restrictions actually promote the spread in their own way, or they have no effect on the spread of the virus at all.  Regardless, the doctors running this farce have to admit that they’re being out-smarted - by a virus!

Because government is controlling everything, they won’t let the free market, where 99 percent of the knowledge and brainpower resides, apply itself to come up with solutions to their problem.  For example, why aren’t electrostatic precipitators flying off the shelves the same way that toilet paper and N95 masks were?  Because the bureaucrats-cum-doctors never worked in an industrial environment, and have no idea how industry deals with hygiene.  They don’t know, and won’t let the expertise that resides in the population at large come up with ideas.

When this is over, Ford needs to resign.  Doctors need to get fired.  And Ontario needs a Libertarian party.

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Weird Voting in New Mexico

Vincent J. Curtis

18 Dec 20

New Mexico was another one of those states I thought Trump might flip in 2020.  Evidently, he did too as he put in a campaign stop in that state, and the head of the Republican Party in New Mexico said just before the election that Trump would carry his state.  Trump didn’t.

New Mexico has been a reliably Democrat voting state for several cycles now, and Fox News called the state for the Democrat in both 2016 and 2020 within minutes of the polls closing.

Why should Trump carry New Mexico?  I thought the Wall and his appeal to Hispanic voters would siphon enough support from the Democrat that he would pull it off.

The results of New Mexico’s presidential returns since 2008 and tabulated below:

New Mexico   2008 2012 2016 2020

Democrat 472,442     408,312     385,234     501,614

Republican 346,832     331,915     319,667     401,894

Barack Obama was the Democratic candidate in 2008 and 2012.  He was new, untarnished, progressive, promised hope and change, and seemed to mean the end of racism in America.  John McCain was the Republican contender and had been Senator from neighboring state Arizona for several decades.  He was well known to New Mexicans, a war hero, all scuffed up politically from his decades in Washington, and his health was questioned.  New Mexico’s preference for Democrats is illustrated in 2008.

In 2012, Barack Obama again carried the Democratic banner.  He was better known, less liked, and people were less enthusiastic about him.  Mitt Romney was from Utah, a Mormon running in a state of a lot of members of the LDS.  New Mexicans were less enthusiastic about Romney than they were about McCain.  Both candidates, Obama and Romney, showed declines in vote tallies from 2008.

Hillary Clinton was another progressive hopeful carrying the Democrat banner, and if elected she would be the first woman president.  The vote for her showed a further drop off in Democrat support from 2012.  I’s not sure New Mexicans care much about progressive ideas or radical social change.

Donald Trump in 2016 was a property developer from New York City, and was widely considered an off-the-wall candidate who stood no chance of winning.  His promise to build a border wall proved unavailing among New Mexicans, and support for the Republican candidate followed the Democrat in decline in 2016.  Trump’s support in 2016 was even lower than Romney’s in 2012.

Something happened in 2020.  Trump built his Wall, the economy boomed, and folks at the lower end of the wage scale benefited the most.  Unemployment among Hispanics fell to the lowest percentage in the records.  True, the pandemic happened, but it wasn’t the catastrophe in New Mexico that it was in other states.  The voting patterns in New Mexico do not show a strong interest in so-called social justice issues.  Trump ought to do better, and with Joe Biden as the Democrat candidate, there is no reason to suppose he would do much better than Hillary and certainly not better than Obama in 2008.

Yet, that is exactly what happened.  Trump increased his vote total by 83,000, or 26 percent, easily eclipsing McCain’s high water mark for Republicans in 2008, and would have beaten Hillary in 2016 with that vote total.  However, Joe Biden increased the Democrat vote total by 117,000, and increase of 30 percent over Hillary’s 2016 count, and easily surpassing Obama’s 2008 numbers.

The question arises what was the dynamic that produced such enthusiasm for old, plain Joe Biden?  You would think that enthusiasm for Trump would draw votes from Democrats, but Biden seems to have found a hitherto untapped well of support for Democrat over the Republican.  One can understand the rise in support for Trump, but the social dynamics of New Mexico don’t explain why Biden would do so well, period.  Why would such support turn out just when the Republican looked like he might carry the state?  I get that Trump can generate as much hostility as he can enthusiasm, but the normal progressive motivations that might drive people in the coastal states doesn’t apply to New |Mexico.  What would drive New Mexican Democrats into a voting frenzy, never hitherto witnessed, with a candidates giving so little reason to be enthusiastic about?  It was almost as if Democrats knew Trump could carry the state, and they were bound to stop him.  But that motivation shouldn't be that powerful in New Mexico.

The 2020 presidential vote in New Mexico looks weird.

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Do lockdowns actually promote spread?

Vincent J. Curtis

17 Dec 20

Has it occurred to anyone in authority that lockdowns may promote the spread of COVID-19?  Let’s look at the evidence.

Lockdown measures are designed to suppress the spread of the virus.  That means that the social isolation measures of a lockdown status are more than necessary to hold the spread rate constant.  Yet, the harder the province locks down, the higher the daily case rate becomes.  The experts were supposed to be ahead of the curve, not behind it.

Lockdowns force people who live in apartment buildings and multi-generational dwellings to spend more time in them, and intra-family transmissions is thought to be the biggest pathway of spread.  Now that it’s getting colder, the air within dwellings is getting worse.  The virus can collect.  Forcing so many people to breathe the same air seems like a scenario for transmission.

A strategy to reduce close person-to-person interactions looks doomed to failure.  People may be divided into tiny groups and groups put into cubicles, but they still breathe the same air.  The lockdown strategy may reduce the incidents of “super-spreading”, but it won’t stop the spread.  The lockdown strategy prolongs the crisis, at best, but there is no evidence that it reduces the total number of people eventually infected.

Assuming lockdown measures have any effect at all, and there is zero experimental evidence that they do, only statistical hopes, lockdowns may promote the spread by forcing large numbers of people who live in certain kinds of dwellings to all breathe the same air for prolonged periods of time.

Prolonging the crisis doesn’t seem smart in view of the social, educational, and economic side-effects.  The trends of data seem to show that lockdowns perversely may enhance transmission, and that enhancement may occur among certain classes of people.

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Erin O’Toole backtracks on residential schools

Vincent J. Curtis

17 Dec 20

President Donald Trump taught conservatives how to deal with cancel culture, and Erin O’Toole seems not to have absorbed the lesson.  Hence, the Conservative Party is forced to witness its new leader in humiliating retreat from a perfectly reasonable position.

Education of children was a great liberal-progressive cause in the 19th century.  When Canada was formed, education was made a major and exclusive responsibility of the provinces.  When Canada acquired Rupert’s Land, the territory was not without population, and until provinces came into existence education was the responsibility of the federal government.  Even after provinces were created, education of aboriginal children, which was considered a good thing, remained a federal responsibility in part because Indians were not British subjects.

It was also the liberal-progressive belief at the time that Indians would not long survive European settlement, and that if anything of them were to survive they needed to be integrated into British civilization.  Education of children was considered both good in itself and a way of enabling the Indian race to integrate and survive.  Yes, coercive policies to force integration were adopted, but we’re familiar with coercion.

These liberal-progressive beliefs persisted, and as late as 1969 Prime Minister Trudeau proposed abolishing Indian status altogether, and that policy wasn’t removed from the Liberal platform until 2014.

O’Toole gave a generous and sympathetic portrayal both of Langevin’s and Ryerson’s intentions, and of the Indian position that things went sideways from the start.  The accusation of “cultural genocide” was considered over-the-top then, and remains so today, and the year zero fanatics of the commentariat who appear shocked at O’Toole’s portrait merely show how little of history they know.

Regrettably, O’Toole shamed himself and embarrassed his followers by caving to nonsensical criticism.

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The Signs of Fraud

Vincent J. Curtis

15 Dec 20

The 2020 presidential election produced many accusations of voter fraud.  The purpose of this brief study is to show some statistical anomalies that would give rise to such accusations.

Two of the major states that support Democratic candidates for president are New York and California.  Both states produce reliably large majorities for the Democratic candidate, and, in fact, delivered the plurality by which the Democratic candidates in 2016 and 2020, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, won the popular vote nation-wide.  There would be no reason to employ ballot box stuffing for either state to produce anything but a solid majority to the Democratic contender.  Nevertheless, for this reason, statistical anomalies stand out better without castings doubt upon who actually won the states.

Both California and New York are in population decline.  Both states have been under Democrat rule for more than a decade.  California’s policies have driving out its middle class over the last ten years, while New York City under Mayor Bill De Blasio has been driving out its well-to-do, particularly during the pandemic.  In fact, New York City has been thought to have lost 1.5 of its 8.5 million inhabitant since April of this year.

A reasonable conclusion that the vote totals in both states should be stagnant or on the decline generally, and there is reason the Democrat vote not to increase by much.

In 2008, Barack Obama was the Democrat standard-bearer.  He was new, relatively unknown, charismatic, and Black.  Being Black, his election promised to put American’s history of racism behind it.  Electing a Black man president would demonstrate that racism was effectively dead in America.  There was plenty of reason among progressives and independents to come out and vote for him and against the Republican candidate, John McCain.  While McCain was a war hero, he was also an old, white man, not noted to be especially conservative, and his health was questioned.

The results of the 2008 election in both states are produced in the table below.  Obama, as expected, won convincingly in both states.

In 2012, Obama ran against Mitt Romney.  This time, Obama was better known, less liked, and tarnished by his four years in office.  His first term had not been especially good for American prosperity, and there was doubt he would be re-elected.  American history is littered with presidents who did worse in their second election than in their first, and the results of 2012 demonstrate Obama’s declining appeal.

California     2008     2012     2016     2020

Democrat 8,274,473 6,493,424 8,753,788 11,098,676

Republican 5,011,781 4,202,127 4,483,810 5,994,674

New York     2008     2012     2016     2020

Democrat 4,804,945 3,875,826 4,556,124 5,004,506

Republican 2,752,771 2,226,637 2,819,534 3,171,289

Obama’s vote total in California and New York showed declines.  Romney had his issues also, and the Republican totals declined too.

The 2016 election had Democrat Hillary Clinton contending against New York developer Donald Trump.  If elected, the progressive Clinton would have been the first woman president in American history.  Trump was considered an off-the-wall candidate by many, and no one expected his election.  Clinton got slightly more votes in California in 2016 than Obama did in 2008, but not by much; and she split the difference between what Obama got in New York in 2008 and 2012.  Trump did hardly better in New York than the previous Republicans did in 2008 and 2012, and did worse in California than McCain did in 2008, and fared only slightly better than Romney did in 2012.

The results of 2020 is where the numbers get weird.  Trump did decidedly better in both California and New York in 2020 than he did in 2016.  He got nearly a million more votes in California than McCain’s high water mark of 2008; and he surpassed his previous New York vote by ten percent.  Nation-wide Trump increased his vote total from 60 million in 2016 to nearly 75 million in 2020.

However, Joe Biden wildly surpassed previous Democrat votes.  He surpassed Obama’s 2008 result in California by 34 percent, and in New York by 4 percent.  Biden bested Hillary in California by 27 percent and in New York by 10 percent.  While Trump increased his vote totals in both states, Biden increased the Democrat total by even more, both relatively and absolutely.

Biden’s totals are anomalously large, and they aren’t explained by his campaign or by him as the candidate.  He hardly campaigned.  He is the epitome of the old, sickly, establishment white man.  Yet he did better by any measure among the progressive electorates than either of the transformative progressive candidates, Obama and Clinton.  This, in states with declining populations, and when his opponent was increasing his vote totals quite dramatically also.

I get than Trump can produce as much adverse reaction as he gets positive, but  why would so much more of the Democrat base come out for Biden when they were indifferent to Obama and Clinton previously?  Mere hostility to Trump doesn’t seem to explain it.  Being the not-Trump could be a winner if Trump’s vote declined, but it didn’t; it grew dramatically.  California and New York have declining populations and have cause to be distrustful of the Democrat candidate this time around.

Regardless of the merits of the claims of voter fraud, the numbers for Biden are anomalous.  The anomalies cry out for an explanation, and until a plausible explanation is forthcoming, the belief of wide-spread voter fraud will persist among Trump supporters, 75 million strong.

The wide-spread suspicion of illegitimacy is not good for the incoming Administration.

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Vincent J. Curtis is a retired research scientist and occasional free-lance writer.

What Conservatives should be yelling about climate change

Vincent J. Curtis

16 Dec 20

Economics columnist Heather Scofield wonders if yelling counts as the Conservative Party response to greenhouse gases.  Apparently, yelling at the radio hasn’t produced a response so far; but there’s always hope, so let’s take it from the top.

Let’s start with the basic question: why should Canada do anything at all, or much more than we already are?  Canada produces 1.5 percent of the world’s CO2 emission.  If Ontario were obliterated, destroyed, and returned to primordial forest, that would reduce Canada’s output by a third, saving the world 0.5 percent of its total emissions.  That amount, 0.5 percent, is the difference between 408 ppm and 406 ppm.

Explain the climate-shattering difference between 408 and 406 ppm.  Until that question is answered satisfactorily, there can be no discussion of what to do.

What Canada can practically do is much short of obliterating Ontario, and we’re reduced fighting over small fractions of a ppm of greenhouse gases that Canada can do anything about.  Yelling and screaming moralistically about the end of life on earth isn’t going to change the fact that Canada is too small a contributor to be any kind of factor in the climate matter.

At this point, discussions of economic costs and trade-offs should be applied to this question, because why should we do anything at all is more fundamental than and prior to the question of what should we do about it.  Why should we harm ourselves economically at all, needs to be answered seriously first, and not glossed over.

Though often asked, that this hasn’t been addressed is itself telling..

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Trudeau getting seriously stupid about climate change

 Vincent J. Curtis

15 Dec 20

RE: Trudeau getting serious about climate change.  Hamilton Spectator editorial of this date.  The editorial closely follows my ‘an admission of failure’ piece, except in reverse.  It even claims unnamed economists who support the tax, as compared with my named source who is deeply skeptical.

Justin Trudeau isn’t getting serious about climate change with his promise to raise the carbon tax to $170 per tonne, he’s getting seriously stupid about it.  The dramatically raised tax is nothing but a show of moral narcissism that will have no impact whatsoever on the world’s climate.

Let’s start with the fact that Canada produces less than 1.5 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions, while Chine produces 30 percent, the United States 14 percent, and India, 9 percent.  Both China and India are unrestricted until the year 2030 in the amount of CO2 emissions they are allowed to increase, and both countries are building coal-fired power plants as fast as they can.  Whatever savings Trudeau can beat out of Canada will be eclipsed in less than a year by new emissions from China and India.

The United States, however, exceeded its Paris Accord reductions through the miracle of fracking for natural gas, and is the only country to better the Paris Accord.

The carbon tax is aimed at the heart of both Alberta and Saskatchewan, which didn’t elect a single Liberal in the 2019 election.  In punishing his political opponents, Trudeau is also going to harm middle class people in Ontario, because the food they eat will get dramatically more expensive.  The food grown in Western Canada requires massive, diesel powered machinery to produce and to truck to the supermarkets of Hamilton.

Moral narcissism is going to hurt Canada plenty.

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Mandatory COVID Vaccinations

Vincent J. Curtis

7 Dec 20

The approved, progressive position on COVID vaccines has certainly been malleable.  Before the U.S. election, no respectable progressive would trust a vaccine developed under Donald Trump.  No one could trust their safety.  It was all a rush job to aid Trump’s re-election.  So deep was the concern for the development of a vaccine pre-election day that Pfizer kept quiet about the success of its vaccine trials.  They knew on October 19th of the success of their vaccine candidate.  But they, and the FDA, would rather let people die for one month more than announce to the world the success of Trump’s Operation Warp Speed that might contribute to his re-election.

Now that the election is over, and not only Pfizer, but Moderna and AstraZeneca have proven safe and effective vaccines, now the progressive line turns away from that of the anti-vaxxers to the familiar ground of jackboot compulsion.

After nine months of unbridled compulsion, the closing of parks, businesses, livelihoods and social life itself, the idea of forcing people to put a substance into their bodies must seem like small potatoes.  Resistance is simply incomprehensible.

While it is true there is no reference in the Charter protecting people from forced vaccination, we learned during the pandemic that the words of the Charter were empty all along, so “rights” don’t matter.  The state decides, and you must comply.  If you don’t coercion will be applied until you are broken.  That’s polite society’s latest.

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Climate Change Crazies

Vincent J. Curtis

13 Dec 20

The climate change crazies were let out in full force in Saturday’s Spectator.  Richard MacKinnon falsely claimed that Lancet Countdown 2020 holds that climate change is claiming lives, as in killing people.  The report, in fact, speaks of the adverse health effects as a result of climate change.

No respectable climate scientist is claiming that climate change per se is killing people.  Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and fires kill people, but climate change affects climate, it doesn’t kill people.  Nevertheless, MacKinnon says that Canada’s fossil fuel exports are killing people.  The entire article, when it isn’t making clearly false or tendentious assertions of fact, is drawing far-fetched and unsupportable conclusions.

Then there’s Grant Linney.  For him, climate change is a religion, and he was busy calling out heretics.  They include the Liberal party for not being extreme enough, deniers 2.0,  and the subspecies of that designation.  Linney doesn’t make false claims, he makes ridiculous demands, like abolishing the use of fossil fuels altogether.  He doesn’t explain how Canadians will heat their homes, or how agricultural products will be planted, cultivated, harvested, processed, and shipped to his neighbourhood supermarket without them.  He is no advocate for nuclear power, so how all the work gets done without energy is what makes his demand so ridiculous.

Lately, big media has gotten into fact checking news and views, especially those that are controversial.  How did these two works of absurdity sneak past the censors?

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Weird voting in New York State

 Vincent J. Curtis

13 Dec 20

New York is a state in decline.  It has been losing population for decades, and this trend has gotten worse under relentless Democrat rule.  New York City began a rapid and shocking decline under the mayoralty of Bill DeBlasio.  The pandemic caused a loss of population in this city of 8.5 million of an estimated 1.5 million.  Governor Andrew Cuomo famously caused the deaths of 35,000 people by sending old people infected with the corona virus back into nursing homes.  Trump sent New York a 1000 bed naval hospital ship and turned the Jacob Javits Center into a 2900 bed hospital, neither which Cuomo used.  In addition, Cuomo was forced to complement Trump on the latter’s rapid assistance given to New York.

In short, conditions were such that Trump might be able to increase his vote total but there was nothing on the Democrat side that would stir up excitement.  Native daughter Hillary Clinton was not running with the prospect of being the first woman president and a progressive to boot.  Instead, the Democrats ran with the oldest, whitest, most establishment man they could find, Joe Biden, who had no association with the state.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the reliably Democrat state with 4,556,124 votes as compared to Trump’s 2,819,534 votes.  In 2020, Trump increased his vote total to 3,171, 289, an increase of 12 percent.  However, Joe Biden received 5,009,506 votes, increasing the Democrat total by 10 percent.  Third party votes collapsed, from 285,000 in 2016 to 101,000 in 2020, a drop of 65 percent.

New York State is not renowned for voter fraud.  This year, however, New York experimented with mail-in balloting and the results in the primaries were disastrous.  The rejection rate was 25 percent, and results weren’t known for four to six weeks after Election Day.  As a result of the pandemic, mail-in ballots were sent to people who hadn’t resided at the address for months.  Ballots were undelivered all over the City.  Conditions were ripe for fraud, even though New York is reliably Democratic.  Fox News called New York State for the Democrats within seconds of the closing of the polls in both 2016 and 2020.

Strangely, the ballot rejection rate of the presidential election was small.  One would not expect the total ballots cast in 2020 to be higher than in 2016, but they were by a lot, 621,000 votes.  In a state with a declining population, with its major city in population exodus, and with a mail-in ballot that ought to have a high rejection rate.

I get that Trump can raise as much hostility as he does support, but we’re supposed to believe that he generated more hostility than support in New York, a state in chaos, where people have better things to do than go out of their way to register hostility towards Trump?

As in California, The Democrat’s majority in New York was not threatened by Trump increasing his vote total in 2020 over 2016.  There was no need for fraud to ensure Biden carried the state.  But Trump was more popular in New York in 2020 than in 2016, and yet the Democrat increased his vote total by even more than Trump did?  Hostility to Trump among Democrats indifferent in 2016 was such that they got out to vote against him in 2020?

That’s pretty weird.

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Raising carbon tax an admission of failure

Vincent J. Curtis

13 Dec 20

RE: Climate plan includes carbon tax hikes.  Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that the federal carbon tax would be raised to $170 per tonne by 2030 in order to achieve the desired reduction of Canadian CO2 emissions.

Hiking the carbon tax is an admission of failure.  The frog was supposed to be cooked at $30 and then $40 a tonne, but now the temperature in the pot has to be raised to $170 per tonne.  You have to wonder who thought of this, and why are they flogging this dead horse?

The theory is that if you raise taxes on something, you get less of it.  Raising taxes on carbon was supposed to smoothly reduce the use of it to produce CO2, and it was just a matter of finding the right price.  British Columbia had a $30 per tonne provincial tax on carbon, achieved nothing, and so raised it to $40.  Results are inconclusive.  Before the 2019 election, Climate Change Prevention Minister Catherine McKenna said that a federal tax of $30 a tonne would achieve the government’s goal of reduction of CO2 emissions.  When asked to explain how that number was arrived at, it turned out to be a SWG – a scientific wild guess.

The government has no idea if carbon taxes work, but their tax scheme will generate a huge flow of cash that the government can direct towards its chosen winners and deny to its chosen losers.

The losers will be the middle and working classes, who have to drive to work and for work.  The tax doesn’t change the chemical reaction by which hematite ore is converted to pig iron by smelting with coal product, so Hamilton’s steel industry is harmed.  Meanwhile, the work of University of Guelph economist Ross McKitrick is ignored because the lawyers and drama coaches in government don’t like what he has to say about their pet tax.

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Hoping Einstein was wrong about insanity

Vincent J. Curtis

12 Dec 20

RE: Rein in COVID spread for face Christmas lockdown.  Hamilton Spectator of today's date.  

What more proof do you need to show that the medical authorities don’t know what they’re doing?  In the face of utter failure, the medical “experts” have returned to failed measures in the hope that Einstein was wrong about insanity.  When one is reduced to trial and error, one is supposed to learn from error.  But our experts don’t.

The progressive degrees of lockdown are intended to reduce in-person social interactions.  So, what explains rising prevalence of “cases” after lockdown measures tighten?  It is due either to a widespread breakdown in discipline, that the authorities underestimated the prevalence of the virus, or that the measures are just ineffective.  None of these possibilities reflect well on the authorities.

Discipline was good in March and April, but after ten months of failure and mismanagement people are getting impatient.  The authorities held out as a goal, first, a “flattening of the curve” and then eradication of the virus, an impossible goal.  Both failed.  But wide-spread indiscipline doesn’t explain outbreaks only in Windsor-Essex, Toronto, and Peel.  Or Hamilton.

Underestimation of prevalence is a poor excuse since the data is collected every day, and the lockdown imposed is intended to reduce prevalence, not maintain case level.  That is, lockdown measures imposed are supposed to be stronger than necessary.  And that points to a failure of the measures.  Reducing in-person interaction assumes that the experts know the cause of transmission - in-person interaction!  I submit that in-person interaction isn’t the only way of transmission, and that other ways are powerful enough to sustain the pandemic even with minimal person-to-person transmission pathway.

The point is that the pandemic roller-coaster is bad enough without authorities messing up the economy and society with their half-baked theories of control.

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The Rape Culture at McMaster farce continues

Vincent J. Curtis

11 Dec 20

RE: Lessons from Sexual Violence Probe at McMaster.  Hamilton Spectator of today's date.  A continuation of the farce from yesterday.

“I slept with the prof, but I didn’t get the marks I wanted.”  That seems to be the substance of many of the complaints about sexual “violence,” “assault,” and the wonderfully vague, “rape culture.”  McMaster is blameworthy for failing to enforce the corrupt alleged bargain.

The specific allegations against McMaster are couched in terms so vague, they’re meaningless, and useless towards the adoption of any resolution.  McMaster ran a “culture review,” and found “systemic and cultural issues,” “inappropriate behaviours,” (note the ungrammatical use of the plural in behaviours).  There may well be a fire amidst all this smoke, but the police have taken action against it.

The all-knowing Spectator has determined what steps McMaster must take to reform itself.  The first is to believe survivors.  If this was the rule, Joe Biden would be history.  Another is to guarantee fully-informed consent, which means if the prof doesn’t come across with what the girl wants, she gets put into the driver’s seat of the investigation.  The call for elimination of gag orders serves to undermine due process, since witnesses are not to connive with the plaintiff.  The call for more transparency means, in this case, non-criminal violations of McMaster’s “sexual violence” policy gets the accused publicly shamed without due process.

Then comes the clinchers.  “Combat rape culture,” which culture is expressed in jokes and “entrenched structures” that allow people in power to exploit students.  (See para 1)  And “pay people doing the work” of those supporting the plaintiffs.  Let’s institutionalize this and have our people profit from this episode.

Let no crisis go unexploited!

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Intellectual bankruptcy of progressivism: another example

Vincent J. Curtis

10 Dec 20

 RE: McMaster Failing Survivors of Sexual Assault.  Hamilton Spectator of today.

The story which appeared on page 1 is an intellectual fraud.  It ought to have been labelled an opinion piece, but wasn’t.  The most obvious example of its prejudiced nature is its use of the word ‘survivor’ as in ‘sexual assault survivor’ when the word ‘accuser’ is the accurate term.  Until a conviction in court is obtained or some other objective way of assessing truth is employed, an accuser cannot be objectively called a survivor.  That favored expression ‘rape culture’ is employed when rape is almost never the accusation; sexual assault, or sexual violence are.  Finally, the author proceeds without a proper understanding of what a moral agent is.

I don’t know why McMaster University as an institution is being singled out for blame for the existence of the alleged ‘rape culture’ on campus, but it was.  The enforcement of criminal law, which is what ‘rape’ and ‘sexual assault’ call for, is not the job of the University; it is a police matter.  If a member of the faculty has committed a crime, such as fraud or shoplifting, that crime is not the doing of the University as an institution, for the faculty member was not acting as an agent of the University in the course of committing that crime.

It is mysterious when the author writes: “…the university’s handling of their own sexual violence complaints failed to get them justice and left them feeling silenced, their concerns dismissed.”  What ‘justice’ was being sought?  Why didn’t the alleged victim go to the police?  How serious were these accusations, really?  The story is a joke.

The story is also an indictment of progressivism itself.  Since the rise of feminism and the sexual revolution in the 1960s – which saw the end of segregation by sex of university dormitories – it was beaten into men that they can’t touch.  This is the third generation of Canadian students inculcated with the “no touch” rule.  So, how could a “rape culture” even arise in the face of political correctness and progressivism?  Has sexual libertinage been combined with a Victorian sense of morality in today’s progressivism?

Let’s not forget that university campuses in Canada are well populated with people from other, non-European cultures, such as from Arab and African states.  They may not get the “no touch” rule.  Are these the source of the sexual assaults and sexual violence?  If so, that would be a condemnation of the progressive idea that all other cultures are superior to the western one.  The cultural and racial aspect of the “rape culture” went undiscussed in the article.  Is it simply that white girls don’t like being bothered by men from other races and cultures but won’t go so far as to expose themselves to accusations of racism?  Are girls from other cultures and races proportionately represented among the “survivors”?  It went unstated in the article.

It may well be that exploration of this aspect of the matter could prove embarrassing to the thesis of progressivism that the institution is at fault and that other cultures are superior.  An institution being at fault excuses the actual perpetrators of moral blame in the same way that the zoo is morally to blame if it lets its animals out and they create havoc.

What is surpassingly strange is the progressivist assertion of rape culture etc. in the face of fifty years of inculcation against it.  Sexual liberation of women and libertinage does not mean what it appears to imply.  The moral blame is assigned to the highest authority possible, as in the countless examples of conservative leaders being blamed for the sayings and doings of their followers.

All this conduces to show the intellectual bankruptcy of progressivism, but you already knew that.

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Urban Boundary Expansion

Vincent J. Curtis

9 Dec 20

Does the Spectator’s left temporal lobe know what its far-left temporal lobe is thinking?  Apparently not, and a lobotomy is indicated.

Let’s start with two simply propositions: a housing crisis is always and everywhere created by government policies; and this pandemic spreads through too intense social interactions.  The homelessness crisis in Hamilton can allegedly be solved by defunding the police and the city council putting the savings into the construction of cheap, or even free, housing.  This is what the Defund encampment wanted, and the Spectator editorially supported their aims.

The reason house pricing are soaring in Hamilton and Toronto is that government policies have restricted the building of new homes.  Since home builders can’t make money building moderately priced homes, they’re going to build expensive homes.  Sure, you can get government to pay for new construction, but these houses aren’t free.  It takes materials and labour to build and land to put them on.  How do you sell these, even at below market prices, to people who can’t and don’t work?  And what about depressing the value of the homes of people who bought at the peak of the market?  It’s their property taxes that pay for selling houses below market; that’s not fair.

Boundary expansion is about making room for more moderately priced housing.  Take it away, and you’ll get more price inflation.  We want more single family dwellings if we are to maintain a healthy social distancing.  The pandemic spreads most quickly where people live closely together.  There are good points to urban “sprawl.”  All the worst places of COVID spread are where people are jammed together.  

Someone’s going to provide municipal services to these new neighborhoods; it might as well be Hamilton.  The opposition to urban sprawl is about progressivism’s hatred of successful western economies: about driving cars and building roads, and having space to live and breathe in.  The evils of sprawl is all you hear about; nothing about real benefits of life in massive apartment complexes living cheek-by-jowl like 1970s Moscow.

On a deeper note, all this theory of defunding police and using government power to create government housing to solve an alleged homelessness crisis is simply another manifestation of Marxism-Anarchism-Nihilism.  Marxism is the economics of fools and tyrants, but it always boasted that it was “scientific,” as in “scientific socialism.”  The Defund movement is discrediting the economics system it believes in.  In a way, science is knowledge of that which occurs naturally.  Yet, the Defund movement is all about forcing something that isn’t happening naturally, namely, a resolution of an alleged homelessness crisis.  Defunders are about forcing a reluctant government to reallocate its budget in a specific way that will force an end to the crisis de jure.  Defunders won’t hear of simply greater spending to solve their problem, the money has to come out of the police budget.  It gets complicated, but one can see that the Defunders are more about defunding the police rather than solving a homelessness crisis by any means possible.  This goes to the Anarchism-Nihilism part of their political agenda.

Elected politicians are intellectually at sea.  When the Defunders began their protest on city hall grounds, the council issued a press release in which the council “encouraged the demonstration.”  What?? They’re demonstrating against you, city council, and you say you encourage it?  Where are your resignations?  They ought to be expressing indifference to the demonstration, as distinct from the alleged reason for it.

The truly scientific way to solve a housing crisis is to ease restrictions and let the free market work it out.  That is more nature’s way than even greater doses of the planning that led to the crisis in the first place.

With the left, the issue is never the real issue; the real issue is power.

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Weird Voting in California

Vincent J. Curtis

7 Dec 20

Like her sister states on the left coast, Washington and Oregon, California is a hard-core reliably Democrat state.  There have been no Republican state-wide office holders in Californian in a couple of decades.  Both Senators are Democrats, along with the governor and both houses of the state legislature.  California contributed Hillary Clinton’s ultimately unavailing majority of the popular votes in the 2016 election.  Fox News called California for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and for Joe Biden in 2020 within seconds of the closure of the polls.

The Democrat governor and Democrat mayor of Los Angeles have been heavy-handed in their dealing with the pandemic.  Homelessness in the state got really bad the last few years, especially in Los Angeles and San Francisco.  The business district of Santa Monica was destroyed by Antifa and BLM rioters in July.  The governance of California has been so incompetent the last four decades that despite an idyllic climate, the state has suffered a net loss in population the last decade.  The loss is primarily of the middle class.  In short, the political conditions are such that one would expect the results of the 2016 election to be maximalist for the Democrats, especially when the prospect was of the first woman as president and a progressive to boot.  Joe Biden in 2020 was the old, white establishment man who didn’t campaign and whom nobody respected.

The results of 2016 quite unsurprisingly favored Hillary Clinton.  She garnered 8,753,788 votes, compared to Trump’s total of 4,483,810.  Third party candidates split approximately 821,000 votes among them.  That differential between Hillary and Trump of 4.4 million votes provided Hillary with her margin of the popular vote in the 2016 election.  In 2020, however, Trump increased his vote total to 5,994,679, but Joe Biden increased the Democrat nominee’s total to an astonishing 11,098,676.  Meanwhile, the vote total of third party candidates dropped to 239,000.  Trump increased his vote total by 34 percent between 2016 and 2020, Joe Biden the Democrat nominee’s by 27 percent, and the third party candidates lost 71 percent.

The election in California was marked by numerous, astonishing, spontaneous displays of support for Trump completely unconnected with his campaign.  Republicans ordinarily hide their political affiliation out of fear of reprisal in that state, but this election found them downright assertive.

Trump’s surge in 2020 California presented no danger to Hillary’s margin of 2016.  No one expected California to flip to Trump.  All the polling showed Trump and the Republicans to be way behind Biden and the Democrats.  So, what explains the rise by 2,345,000 votes of Democrat support for Biden – after Trump increased his total by 1,513,000 votes?  The collapse of third parties could only contribute 582,000 votes.  Where did the addition 3.3 million come from?  Where are all these voters coming from, in a state with a falling population?

The Democrat total of 2016 ought to have been a maximum for 2020.  Nobody cares about Joe Biden as compared to Hillary Clinton.  I get that Trump both creates enthusiasm among supporters, and sparks active hostility among others.  But is the hostility so much greater in 2020 than it was in 2016?  Didn’t Californians hold Trump in complete contempt the first time?  Why would so many more people complacent in 2016 come out to vote against Trump in 2020 after all the disincentives from the Democrat side?

And why, in the face of the upsurge for Biden, would the House of Representatives see more Republicans elected from California in 2020 than in 2018?  Okay, Trump has coattails and Biden doesn’t, but why would a Democrat voter vote only for Biden for president and not vote for the Democrat House Representative further down the ballot?  Were those addition millions of Biden ballots marked with his name alone, and no one else’s?

The corruption of California’s election system is legendary, and explains why it is a Democrat one-party state.  California has legal vote-harvesting!  This time, they had mail-in ballots as well.  In order to maintain a substantial Democrat majority in the presidential popular vote nation-wide, running votes exclusively for Biden would accomplish that without touching House races and raising unnecessary suspicion thereby.  Running Biden votes wouldn’t change anything nationally, since Biden was going to carry California anyhow; it would only ensure a Biden majority in the popular vote.  Nevertheless, Trump supporters during the campaign felt their own strength, regardless of the impression the public (i.e. suppression) polls was trying to make.

The creation of well over two million votes for Joe Biden alone in California could have been an effort to hide the Democrat voter fraud going on in other states.

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Weird Voting in Washington State

Vincent J. Curtis

7 Dec 20

Like Oregon, Washington State is a rock-solid reliably Democrat state.  Fox News called the state for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and for Joe Biden in 2020 immediately after the polls closed.  Like Oregon, Washington State votes by mail and has had the system in place long enough to have squeezed out the corruption.

Like Oregon, Washington State has been the scene of terrible rioting and violence - in its capital city of Seattle.  The city police chief resigned after the city council voted to defund the Seattle police department.  The state has been heavy-handed in its dealing with the pandemic.  Trump had been pressuring the state government to step in with military force to quell the violence, and Trump deployed U.S. Marshals to protect Federal property in Seattle, when the state government refused to do.

All in all, this would be a test case of whether the people of Washington State were looking for a change from the one-party rule they have voted for for decades.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton collected 1,742718 votes to Trump’s 1,221,747, and she carried the state.  In 2020, Trump increased his vote total to 1,584,651, but Joe Biden increased the Democrat nominee’s total to 2,369,612.  Trump’s increase was 362,000 votes (30 percent), while Biden’s increase was 627,000 votes (36 percent).  Third party votes collapsed in 2020, from 236,000 in 2016 to 99,000 in 2020 (58 percent).

We are confronted with the same question as in Oregon: where did all these votes come from?  Mail-in voting forces the citizens to be as politically engaged as the state can make them, but somehow 851,000 more votes were counted in 2020 than in 2016.  In a reliably Democrat state, the Democratic candidate increased his vote total by 36 percent while simultaneously increasing the Republican candidate’s totally by 30 percent, in a year when Democrat rule ought to be out of favor.

Maybe Washington staters drank the Kool-Aid to the point where they’ll die before they give up on progressivism, but why weren’t they so engaged to support Hillary Clinton in 2016?  If progressivism and the prospect of the first woman president wasn’t motivating enough in 2016, why would it suddenly be now with Seattle enflamed with progressivism?

Biden’s win of Washington State was not unexpected, but what was unexpected was that he would increase Democrat support over that of 2016 – even as Trump increased his support in the state!

Weird!

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Weird Voting in Oregon

Vincent J. Curtis

7 Dec 20

Oregon is a rock-solid, reliably Democratic state.  It has been the scene, however, of prolonged and terrible rioting in Portland, and Portland is the home city of Antifa.  Rioting and burning lasted for over 100 days beginning in June.  Trump called upon the city’s mayor and state’s governor to do something – like call in the military to put down what looked like an insurrection.  The question for me was, will the people of Oregon put two and two together and figure out that monolithic Democrat rule is no longer a good thing?  Maybe throwing a vote Trump’s way might shock the Oregonian establishment into changing their ways.  Alternatively, are the people of Oregon so drunk on the Kool-Aid that they would die before they changed their progressive mindset?

In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the state of Oregon with 1,002,106 votes, while Trump took 782,403 votes.  There were 144,000 votes for third party candidates.  Fox News called the state for Hillary at the moment the polls closed.  In 2020, Joe Biden, as expected, also took the state with 1,340,383 votes and Trump having 958,499 votes.  Third party candidates took 59,000 votes.  Trump increased his vote total by 176,000 (up 23 percent), but Biden increased the Democrat vote total by 338,000 (up 34 percent), double the increase of Trump between the 2016 and 2020 elections.  Third party support collapsed.  Trump was simultaneously more popular and proportionately less popular in Oregon between 2016 and 2020.

It’s hard to make sense of these outcomes.  Oregon has voted by mail for quite some time, so ballot fixing should be squeezed out of the system by now.  Voters are as engaged as the system can force them to be.  So, how is it possible in a Democrat state to increase the vote total for the Democrat nominee by 34 percent, while simultaneously increasing support for the Republican nominee by 23 percent?  Overall, there was a 22 percent increase in total votes in 2020 over 2016.  (Support for third party candidates dropped by 59 percent.) Where did all these extra votes come from, given the prior level of political engagement and the chaos of the civil disturbances?  It makes sense that people tired of the chaos might vote for Trump, but that ought to take votes from Biden.  However, it didn’t; Biden grew the Democrat vote by almost double Trump’s growth.

What would stimulate so many previously quiet Democrats to wake up and vote this time, given the manifest failure of Democrat rule burning before their eyes?

It’s a mystery to me.  But the results in Oregon show the pattern of a big gain in votes by Trump and an even bigger gain in votes by the Democrat nominee between 2016 and 2020.

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Weird Voting in Michigan

Vincent J. Curtis

6 Dec 20

Trump narrowly won Michigan in 2016.  The vote was so close, the state wasn’t actually called the night of the election by any network.  Trump got 2,279,543 votes while Hillary Clinton got 2,268,839, a difference favoring Trump by 10,700 votes.  Since 2016, Trump worked diligently to benefit Michigan.  He re-negotiated NAFTA to bring back more auto sector jobs; he talked Japan into putting assembly plants into the state, and he had his Department of Housing and Urban Development focus on Detroit to improve the condition of that city.

You would think all this work would pay off in terms of votes.  Trump campaigned heavily in Michigan, and he got 2,649,852 votes in 2020, an increase of 370,000 votes over 2016.  However, Joe Biden somehow secured 2,804,040 votes, an increase over Hillary’s 2016 result by 535,000 votes, with the bulk coming from Wayne County, that is, Detroit.

In 2016, some 240,000 votes were cast for third party candidates such as Stein, Johnson, and Castle.  Even if all of those went to Biden, Trump would still have carried the state by 151,000 votes.  We went to bed at 3:00 a.m. on the morning of November 4th, with Trump holding a 100,000 vote lead.  Only Wayne County had yet to report.  This was strange, since Wayne County is home to the big city of Detroit and had reported in good time in 2016.

In 2016, everyone was surprised by Trump’s victory.  As a result, places like Wayne County, Philadelphia, and Madison didn’t hold back their returns.  Hence, when it because obvious at the end of the evening on November 8th, 2016, that Trump would win, there was nothing left to fudge with.  In 1960, Chicago mayor Richard Daley held back the Chicago vote returns until he was certain how many Democrat votes he needed to produce for Kennedy to carry the state of Illinois.  In the “blue-wall” states, the deeply Democratic (and corrupt) cities failed to hold back returns in 2016 until they were sure of Hillary’s win.  Because they didn’t, Trump pulled out his improbable victory.  This time, in 2020, Democrats in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania made sure they didn’t make that same mistake.  Somehow, after 3:00 a.m. Trump massive lead disappeared, and Joe Biden managed to find literally hundreds of thousands of votes in Detroit.  There were more votes than registered voters in many polls.  It was enough to throw Biden over the top.

They want us to believe that the black precincts of Detroit voted for Joe Biden in greater numbers than voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

Michigan used mail-in voting, an invitation to fraud.  The returns and the pattern of returns cry out for a forensic audit and criminal investigation.  When the Republican returning officers refused to certify the returns of Wayne County, they were threatened and harassed until they submitted.

Michigan’s alleged vote returns are not to be believed on account of all the fraud and thuggish conduct in Wayne County.  You don’t go to bed with a 100,000 vote lead, and 90 percent of polls reporting, and wake up in the morning behind, all on account of fantastically disproportionate returns that were put into the system in the dead of night.

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Weird Voting in Wisconsin

Vincent J. Curtis

6 Dec 20

Trump won Wisconsin in 2016.  It was the first section of the “blue-wall” to collapse.  Its collapse marked the doom of the Hillary Clinton campaign.  Wisconsin is historically a Democrat state, but Republicans have broken through here and there over the last ten years, particularly with the success of Scott Walker as governor.  Given Trump’s “America First” policy and his support of the American worker, one would expect Trump to hold the state against a liberal onslaught from the university town of Madison.  He campaigned there, and Joe Biden did not.  The destruction of Kenosha shocked everyone, and ought to have hardened hearts against those who supported the destruction and the anarchy.  You know, the people around Joe Biden.

However, that’s not how things apparently turned out.  In 2016, Trump got 1,405,284 votes while Hillary Clinton got only 1,382,536.  Trump’s margin of 23,000 ought to be secure if he increased his vote total by another 205,000 votes.  You’d think.  However, despite Trump getting 1,610,184 votes in Wisconsin in 2020, Joe Biden managed to get 1,630,866, a margin of victory of 21,000 votes and a swing of 44,000 votes.  The total increase of votes between Trump and his Democrat rivals was 452,000, an increase of 10 percent between 2016 and 2020.  The question arises, where did these votes come from?

Given the demographics of the state, Biden’s vote could only come from a few metropolitan areas.  Could Madison produce 248,000 more votes for Biden than it did for Hillary in 2016?  That’s what we’re supposed to believe.

I get that Trump can cause as much an adverse reaction as he does a positive one, but we are supposed to believe that love for Trump produced 205,000 more votes in Wisconsin, but the adverse reaction produced 248,000 more than in 2016.

Wisconsin’s returns cry out for an audit and a criminal investigation.  The state used mail-in balloting, which is an open invitation to fraud without strict controls, which weren’t followed.  At least the Democrats in Wisconsin weren’t as obscene in their fraud as that in Nevada, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Maine.

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Weird Voting in Minnesota

Vincent J. Curtis

6 Dec 20

Minnesota was one of those states I though Trump would flip in 2020.  Trump’s “America First” economic policy restored the economic viability of Minnesota’s”iron range.”  Trump secured a ship building contract for Duluth, which saved the shipyard, a major employer in town.  Five Democrat mayors from the iron range came out in support of Trump, and Trump campaigned actively in the state.  Finally, the rioting in Minneapolis ought to have soured a lot of people on left-wing, i.e. Democrat policies.  Biden’s staff contributed bail money to the destroyers of Minneapolis.

Trump came close in 2016.  He got 1,322,951 votes to Hillary Clinton’s 1,367,716.  Hillary carried the state by 45,000 votes, and another 203,003 votes were perhaps siphoned away from Hillary by third party candidates Stein, Johnson, and McMullen.

In 2020, Trump increased his vote tally by 161,000, to a total of 1,484,065.  This surpasses Hillary’s 2016 tally by 117,000 votes, accounting for 58 percent of the third party votes of 2016.  Should be enough to win, right?  Wrong!  Joe Biden got 1,717,077 votes, accounting for all of Hillary’s 2016 votes, all the third party votes of 2016, and an additional 147,000 votes.  Where did all these additional voters come from?  Trump lost 2020 by a bigger margin in the state than he did in 2016, despite increasing his vote total by 117,000!

I get that Trump can arouse as much active hostility as he can arouse support, but where did 350,000 votes for Biden come from, given that Trump increased his total by 117,000?  That’s an increase in turnout of 31 percent!

Minnesota used mail-in balloting, an invitation to fraud.  The election in Minnesota cries out for a forensic audit, and a criminal investigation.

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Weird Voting in Nevada

Vincent J. Curtis

6 Dec 20

Nevada was one of those states I thought Trump would flip in 2020.  The race was close all night in 2016, and the state was called late in the evening.  The vote went weird in 2020.

In 2016, Trump got 512,058 votes and Hillary Clinton got 539,260, a difference of 27,000, and Hillary carried the state.  In 2020, Trump held several massive rallies in Nevada during the campaign in the teeth of resistance and downright harassment of the state’s Democrat governor.  Trump’s hard work paid off.  His vote tally in 2020 amounted to 669,890, an increase of 157,000 over 2016, and surpassing Hillary’s 2016 total by 130,000 votes.

Alas, the returns came in slowly.  Long after Utah finished, Nevada had hardly begun, and by the end of several day’s counting, Joe Biden ended up with 703,486 votes, surpassing Hillary’s tally by 164,000.  Despite Trump increasing his vote tally by 157,000 over 2016, he lost by a bigger margin in 2020 to Joe Biden!  Joe Biden surpassed Hillary’s total by 164,000 votes!

What could account for such a differential?  Joe Biden didn’t campaign at all in Nevada, and Las Vegas is notoriously corrupt, politically.  I get that the Democrats could arrange for thousands of votes to be generated on behalf of Biden in order to overcome a small deficit state-wide, but 164,000 more votes in 2020 than in 2016 seems incredible.  What could account for such an upsurge in Democratic support?  What could account for such an upsurge in voter turnout over 2016?  I get that politically involved New Englanders might get their dander up over Trump; I get that SEIU operations could generate thousands of additional Democrat votes in Clark County if needed, but 164,000 staggers the imagination.  What would so arouse Nevadan against Trump?  Between Trump and Biden, that’s 321,000 more votes in 2020 than in 2016, an increase of 30 percent in turnout!  New Hampshire and Maine only showed 15 percent increases in turnout.

Nevada used mail-in balloting, an invitation to fraud.  It looks to me that fraud was engaged in on a massive scale on behalf of Biden.  Nevada is a Democrat state; I get that.  But Trump’s increase over 2016 was by itself staggering, and ought to have carried the state.  Over the days of counting, Biden accumulated an even more staggering increase over 2016.

The Nevada election cries out for criminal and forensic investigation.

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Weird Voting in Maine

Vincent J. Curtis

6 Dec 20

Maine was one of those states I thought Trump might flip in the 2020 election.  In 2016, he lost to Hillary Clinton.  Given that Trump had both benefited the state in his first term and campaigned in it in 2020 while Joe Biden did not, I thought Trump deserved the appreciation of more voters in 2020 than in 2016.

Indeed, that was the case.  In 2016, Trump got 335,593 votes in Maine and Hillary Clinton got 357,735 votes, enabling her to carry the state.  In 2020, Trump got 360,480 votes, surpassing Hillary’s total of 2016, but Joe Biden got 434,966 votes, roughly 77,000 more that Hillary got in 2016.  Trump boosted his tally by 25,000 while Biden increased the Democratic tally by 77,000.  That’s 102,000 more votes cast in the state in 2020 than in 2016.  I get that Trump would generate more enthusiasm among his base, but how could limpid Joe Biden generate so much more enthusiasm - three times as much - among Democrats?

Maine employed mail-in balloting, an invitation to fraud.  We are left with two possibilities: either Trump generated much more active hostility among white New Englanders – three times as much – than he created through his presidency, or there was voter fraud in Maine.  Perhaps Joe Biden would have carried the state anyway, since Trump only surpassed Hillary’s 2016 total by 3,000 votes; but Joe Biden’s increase of 77,000 in such a small state seems weird, out of place.  The fraudsters may have given the game away by creating too many votes.  The total vote in Maine increased by 15 percent, 2020 over 2016, just like in New Hampshire.

While I’m prepared to concede that Biden would have carried the state merely by increasing the Democratic tally by 4,000 votes over 2016, his actual increase of 77,000 is suspicious.

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Weird Voting in New Hampshire

Vincent J. Curtis

6 Dec 20

New Hampshire was one of the states I thought Trump would flip in 2020.  He didn’t, and Fox News called the state for Biden much earlier in the evening than it called the state in 2016.  In 2016, there was a hotly contested Senate race in the state as well as the presidential election, and the vote was running neck-and-neck all night.  The failure of Trump to flip the state and the early call by Fox prompted a comparison of the 2016 results with 2020.  The results were surprising.

In 2016, Trump got 345,790 votes and Hillary Clinton, 349,526, carrying the state.  In 2020, Trump got 365,660, and increase of almost 20,000 over 2016, and Joe Biden, 429,938, an increase of 80,000 votes over the Clinton tally of 2016.  Such a large increase by Biden is odd inasmuch as there was no Senate race in New Hampshire this year, and so one might expect fewer votes, not 100,000 - dramatically - more votes in the state.

Digging further, in the 2016 primaries, the contest between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton produced a total of 251,000 primary votes.  In 2020, in which there were more than a dozen candidates for the Democratic nomination, the total Democratic vote was 297,000, an increase of 46,000 votes.  Joe Biden placed fifth in New Hampshire, with 24,921 votes.  It might make sense that 46,000 more Democratic primary votes would translate into that many more votes for the Democratic candidate in the general election, but what accounts for an increase of 80,000?  Joe Biden was weighed by the primary voters and found wanting – considerably; but how could he pull all those additional Democratic primary votes and then add 44,000 more?

One major change between 2016 and 2020 was the adoption by New Hampshire of mail-in voting.  Is it possible the mail-in ballots found 80,000 Democrats too lazy to vote in a primary?  New Hampshire takes pride in its first-in-the-nation primary, and a lot of time and money is spent attracting New Hampshire voters for their open primary.  The sheer native enthusiasm for presidential elections suggest that the most people are already engaged.  The 2020 results found 100,000 more people than were engaged in 2016, about 15 percent more.

Trump campaigned in New Hampshire, and Biden did not during the general election.  It seems hard to believe that Biden could do so much better than Hillary Clinton, especially in the absence of a Senatorial race.  We are left with two reasons for the weird Democratic vote tally in New Hampshire: either Trump created more outright hostility among white New Englanders than he created supporters; or there was voter fraud, creating votes for Joe Biden.

Given the numbers, my inclination is towards voter fraud.  Maybe Biden would have won anyway, but the margin is suspiciously large.

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The Farce of 400,000 Cases

Vincent J. Curtis

5 Dec 20

There is farce in Canada now surpassing 400,000 cases.  In early March, Canadians were warned that they would suffer as many as 350,000 deaths from coronavirus in a matter of weeks.  People would be dropping in the streets, like in China.  Canadians had to lock down for two weeks and hope this wave passed over them.

Now, nine months later, Canada surpassed 400,000 cases – not deaths, cases.  Death total has just crept over 12,000; that two week lockdown was never completely lifted, and Canadians are constantly menaced with another one.  It makes you wonder, who is driving this clown car?

There is no evidence whatever – and none claimed – that the lockdown in March did anything to save lives.  Indeed, the purpose of that lockdown was to flatten the curve - to spread out the strain on the healthcare system.  Total cases and deaths were fixed; it was just a matter of choosing the time at which they would occur.  By design, the first lockdown set Canadians up for the second wave, which is now upon them.  Great strategy!

To spare themselves the embarrassment of admitting they blew it, authorities on health around the world let on that masking would save everything.  Wear a mask and you won’t be fine, the people you breathe on will be.  People sorta understood this, which is why fascist social conformity on masking is prevalent, but they didn’t really get that the masks they were wearing were ineffective as a filter against viruses.  The doctors hadn’t figured out that the virus spreads generally not by people sneezing on one another, but as a dry dust, against which those masks were ineffective as a filter.

The confidence that if all wore masks all would be well, bred a false sense of security.  You can see in the cases curve: the second wave began from the moment that masking became mandatory.  Luckily, none of this really matters.  The virus is deadly almost exclusively to the elderly.  The vast majority of people can go about their daily business with minimal concern.  That 350,000 dead estimate proved dead wrong.

The discipline of masking is enforced on the theory that someone’s grandma is going to die in an LTC facility if you don’t wear one.  Small businesses need to be shuttered for the same reason.  Costco and Walmart can stay open because – let’s be practical!  They have better lobbyists!!  There is no “science” in this at all.

Having put Canada through a first lockdown, which included closing open-air parks even to isolated walkers, there are no financial, social, or psychological reserves left to sustain the country through another one, when conditions are worse than in March.  However, there is no evidence that lockdowns prevent the spread of disease, or reduce deaths. Even the W.H.O. admits this, but a lockdown is the only thing the health care bureaucrats in Canada can think of.  And they have to do something! They can’t look empty handed!

The health care bureaucrats got it wrong from the beginning.  The scale was wrong by two orders of magnitude; the lockdown excesses proved disastrous; the masking mandate proved worse than useless; and now they’re left without new and creative answers.  The words of the Charter were proved empty – all you need to do is to cry “havoc!”

Are there new and better answers?  Sure, but the conformity fascist won’t let them out.

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Liberals move to adopt UN Declaration on indigenous rights

Vincent J. Curtis

4 Dec 20

The Liberals attempting to entrench the U.N. Declaration on Indigenous Rights is bound to disappoint Indigenous Peoples.  But it will sure make white liberals feel good about themselves.  The principles of the Declaration are unworkable in Canadian law. The Declaration expressly states it creates no new rights, and it is not pleadable in court.  So, other than feel good, what is the point?  It can only falsely raise expectations.

Chuck Strahl, once Minister of Indian Affairs, said the Declaration was "unworkable in a Western democracy under a constitutional government." "In Canada, you are balancing individual rights versus collective rights, and the Declaration ... has none of that. By signing on, you default to this document by saying that the only rights in play here are the rights of the First Nations. And, of course, in Canada, that's inconsistent with our constitution." "In Canada ... you negotiate on this ... because (native rights) don't trump all other rights in the country. You need also to consider the people who have sometimes also lived on those lands for two or three hundred years, and have hunted and fished alongside the First Nations.”

Article 19 of the Declaration appears to require Indigenous consent to matters of general public policy.  Such a legal right is saved from embarrassment by there being no unified voice that can give Indigenous consent.  It would be intolerable for Canadian law or foreign policy to have to be approved by a body representing the Indigenous to proceed. (Those of you who have followed the Wetsuwet'en saga in B.C. and the ongoing "land back" occupation in Caledonia, Ontario, understand the futility of relying on aboriginal "government."  The Declaration contradicts itself in proposing an aboriginal veto on national policy because the only political construction that could be said to represent the aboriginal voice are structures invented by whites.  It is impossible to invent an authentic aboriginal assembly because no such thing ever existed before the whites came.  Even the Assembly of First Nations is an invention of whites that is funded by whites and is the pet of the Liberal party.)

This is just a start of the problems the Declaration, taken seriously, creates.  The Trudeau government is appearing to adopt the Declaration in law in part to make themselves look and feel good, and because they won’t be stuck with disavowing the consequences.

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Rape Culture in the Yukon?

Vincent J. Curtis

3 Dec 20

RE: Rape Culture is thriving in Yukon report says.  by The Canadian Press.  Published in the Spectator today on page A8.

You know they’re lying; it’s a question of how.  Even the editors distrusted the story; that’s why they buried it on page A8.  The story is of an alleged “rape culture” which is said to explain the prevalence of rape in the Yukon.

Except, it really isn’t “rape,” it’s assault, which can mean an unwanted kiss or a punch in the head.

A survey claimed that 61 percent of Yukon’s residents, both men and women, reported a “physical or sexual assault” at least once in their lives after the age of 15, a punch to the head being counted together with an unwanted kiss.  In Nunavut, 52 percent of women and 55 percent of men reported being the victims of assault.  The numbers were not broken down into physical and sexual, and whether the assaults were heterosexual or homosexual.

Somehow, women were supposedly three times more likely to be victims of assault as men, though that disparity was not borne out in the figures quoted in the story.

Nevertheless, the Yukon Status of Women Council claimed these figures established the existence of a rape culture, with Indigenous women being the worst affected by it.  That the Yukon is “relatively recently colonized” is a contributing factor to the existence of this rape culture.  This ‘recent colonization,’ in turn, creates a distrust between Indigenous women and the RCMP, and the women having experienced “massive systemic racism.”

Clearly, the facts don’t support the theory.  The Yukon was settled as a result of the 1898 Klondike gold rush, and the NWMP under the famous Sam Steele were among the first on the scene.  So, the recently colonized business doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.  The fact that the majority of both men and women claimed to be victims casts doubt on the thesis of a rape culture, unless the minority who are the victimizers are indiscriminate as to their tastes in victims.  The large proportion of Indigenous in the Yukon population casts doubt upon the prevalence of “massive systemic racism.”

The additional problem is who are the carriers of this culture?  If Indigenous women are the primary victims, then it must be Indigenous men who are the primary culprits, but that would be un-P.C. to admit, so the rape culture needs to be diffused and generalized into a stain on the colonizers, which, let it be said, are white.

It may well be that the Yukon is a more violent place than downtown Toronto, but the story of the prevalence of a rape culture in the Yukon is a fiction at worst, and intellectually dishonest at best.

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Basic Economics of solving homeless crisis

Vincent J. Curtis

3 Dec 20

RE: The First Unitarian Church of Hamilton sent a letter to the editor demanding government spend money and provide give-aways to solve the homelessness problem in Hamilton.  I'm not sure if this should be put down to soft-headed liberalism or progressivism. 

The First Unitarian Church is to be commended for its work with the homeless, but it has taught the elders nothing about economics.

Housing crises are always and everywhere caused by government policy, and demanding more government action to fix homelessness is like taking the ‘hair of the dog’ in hopes of curing a hangover. 

Let’s start with something really basic.  Government doesn’t build new housing, private contractors do.  There is no “speeding production” of housing.  You just don’t call new construction capacity into existence at the snap of the fingers.  You have to grow the pool of skilled labour, and that skilled labour has to see a prospect of a career in the business or else that worker will choose another career path.

There is another problem with attempting to force down housing prices through a massive building program, and that is the effect on mortgagees who bought their houses when prices were high.  A worker who bought a home for $400,000 doesn’t want to see its value cut to $250,000, particularly not on account of his government - supported by his property taxes - taking pity on people who are homeless because they don’t work.

Solving a housing crisis isn’t as simple as throwing other people’s money at it and government giving things away.

Socialism – what a tangled web it weaves!

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