Quarantining test negative people is irrational and illegal

Vincent J. Curtis

31 Jan 21

RE: New Travel Rules should come as no surprise.  Spectator editorial of 20 Jan 21.

It can drive real scientists around the bend when people with power pretend to be scientists too.  Take for example a well-known drama teacher who decided to kill as much joy as possible and ordered the quarantining of anyone returning to Canada from the sunny Caribbean.

As the Spec editorial described it, upon return by a person is subjected to a rapid COVID test at the airport.  If that person tests negative, they head home to finish their quarantine.  What?  Wait a minute!  They tested negative, they don’t have the disease!!  Quarantines are for people that you don’t know are positive or negative, and the purpose of quarantine is to give time for symptoms to develop or for the disease to run its course.  Quarantining people known to by healthy is not just irrational, it’s illegal under the Quarantine Act.

If the person upon return tests positive, they will be taken to a hotel for isolation.  There are several such hotels in the Toronto area, and the incarcerated are not presently forced to pay for the stay because holding them there is illegal.  Forcing people to pay to be kept unlawfully incarcerated is also illegal.  What are authorities going to do if an inmate calls a cab and simply leaves the premises – arrest them and send them to jail?

Forcing returning Canadians to be tested intrusively at the airport is illegal.  Quarantining people who test negative is irrational and illegal, and forcible confinement of test-positive people is also illegal.  Don’t drag the good name of science into this!

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Why Canada should not choose an Indigenous Governor General

Vincent J. Curtis

29 Jan 21

Selecting an Indigenous for Governor General would be counter-productive to the aim of gaining “reconciliation” with the Indigenous peoples of Canada.  It might make guilt-ridden Anglos feel better about themselves, but any such selection would be rejected by the main stream of the Indigenous people.  The individual would be seen either as a lucky opportunist, or a sell-out.

In the first place, Indigenous people do not regard themselves as Canadian.  They are First Nations, not Canadian.  They regard themselves as sovereign, and distinct from Canada.  They were never classified as British subjects, naturally; and are only Canadian citizens by virtue of the Citizenship Act of 1947 and to the Indian Act of 1951.  They would regard any attempt to make them more like run-of-the-mill Canadian as simply another attempt to extinguish their separate identity and to absorb them into general Canadian society, as was and is one of the aims of the Indian Act since 1876.

The Americans thought that electing Barack Obama president of the United States would end the historical issues of slavery and racism in that country, but it actually made the problem of racism much worse.  Identity politics is tearing America apart, and indulging identity politics in Canada will have similar effect.

The Governor General represents the Queen in Canada.  It would awkward for a beneficiary of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 to represent the monarchy to those charged with upholding that proclamation.

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Mattress Girl’s Revenge

Vincent J. Curtis

28 Jan 21

RE: Province aims to ban probes into student’s sexual pasts.  Hamilton Spectator 28 Jan 21

When you cut through the bafflegab in the story, what is clear is that women’s groups are fighting for the power to destroy men they don’t like.  These men may be cads, but they aren’t criminals.

The give-away is a seemingly minor difference in terminology.  McMaster University has a policy on sexual violence, but the Associate Minister of Children’s and Women’s Issues said the government has zero tolerance for sexual assault.  The difference is that sexual assault is a crime, but sexual violence is an administrative matter under the purview of the university.  The criminal justice system has well developed procedures for investigating and prosecuting sexual assault.  But the university has far less experience in dealing with sexual violence, and the action proposed by the provincial government is a ham-fisted attempt to import “rape-shield” protections of criminal procedures into university administrative policies.

The key change is that the plaintiff, or “survivor” as they are called – note the change in presumption of innocence – cannot be sanctioned for violating the university’s drug and alcohol policy if she admit to violating it in the course of her complaint.  In other words, if mattress girl was drunk or high on drugs and had sex with a guy who was also drunk or high and she later regretted the encounter, she can complain, but his impairment is no defense.

Ontario universities aren’t as wicked on due process as American universities are, but this change gets them closer.

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John Kerry makes Canadian climate efforts hopeless

Vincent J. Curtis

28 Jan 21

At a news conference on January 27, John Kerry, the Biden Administration’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, observed that ninety percent of the world’s CO2 emissions occurred outside United States borders.  He then said that if the United States emissions “went to zero tomorrow”, the problem of the existential threat wouldn’t be solved 

This same argument applies with ten times the force to Canada.  Ninety-eight and a half percent of the world’s CO2 emissions occur outside Canadian borders, and if Canadian emissions went to zero tomorrow, the problem – the existential threat – wouldn’t be solved, or even touched.

Kerry’s remarks came as a shock.  Kerry was trying to justify the Biden Administration rejoining the Paris Accord and starting other initiatives to reduce world CO2 emissions.  But what people heard was that the United States wasn’t the Great Satan of climate catastrophe that they had been told, and they heard it from the lips of one who had intimated that it was.  This candid observation threw into doubt in the minds of many the practicality of self-flagellation over climate.  Unless China and India get on board, painful actions to reduce emissions in America will be fruitless.

The same applies to Canada even more.  Mr. Trudeau’s policies on climate will be utterly futile to the larger problem even if they works perfectly at home.  They will amount to demonstrations of moral vanity to our detriment rather that effective solutions.

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I wouldn’t want a professor like that!

Vincent J. Curtis

27 Jan 21

RE: I wouldn’t want a policy like that.  Hamilton Spectator of today.

The Spectator was finally forthcoming with an article explaining in objective detail its issues with McMaster and the university’s sexual “violence” policy.  It’s quite clear that the object of the policy during the consultation phase was to engage in the most extreme of cancel culture utterly without reference to the principles of fundamental justice.

So far as wokeness goes, the intended policy as pronounced by Professor Dean was weird, because it presumed a male-female gender binary.  The received woke position is that gender is a subjective mental construction without basis in objective reality.  In short, to the truly woke, male on female violence is incoherent since neither gender truly exists.

Regardless, Professor Amber Dean says if she were assaulted on campus, she’d go to the police rather than the university to investigate.  Well, duh!  Criminal matters are police matters, not matters of university administration.  And this is where the principles of justice and the common law come in, to the inconvenience of vicious fanatics like the good professor of cultural studies.  Dean obviously wants a presumption of guilt placed upon the accused.

But then, the university lawyers got involved, and their interest was protection of the university.  Dean complains that the recommended policy got changed into something color-blind and neutral in perspective, and providing no assurance the university would deal with equity issues.  The lawyers drafted something that wouldn’t get the university sued for millions.  As for equity issues, they don’t exist on a university campus.  Everyone’s presence at university is a sign of privilege, especially the foreign students whose families back home can afford the full freight of tuition.

When Dean complains that McMaster “survivors” are rarely told what “their perpetrators” face or have faced, it’s obvious that Dean wants “survivors” to enjoy the grim satisfaction of watching the accused tormented and punished by the agents of the university.  “Survivors” can’t appeal the outcome of an investigation nor the sanctions imposed.  Is this what has become of feminism today, a branch of sadism?  Justice is determined by neutral judges and juries, not enraged accusers.  But Dean isn’t interested in justice.  She wants revenge.

Professor Dean is a sad case of hatred and failed woke progressivism.  I wouldn’t want to be one of her students, because she would surely assign a failing grade to someone in her power who didn’t espouse the orthodoxy she preached.

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Time to End House Arrest?

Vincent J. Curtis

26 Jan 21 

The second wave of COVID has crested and the decline has begun.  And it isn’t a slow decline.  It’s time for Premier Ford to declare victory and get his boot off the neck of Ontarians.

Ford put Ontario into a four week “temporary, one-time” shutdown beginning December 26, when daily case numbers were starting to exceed 2000 per day.  As forecasted here, the shutdown would see a sharp rise in case numbers, followed by a sharp drop off as the fire created by the shutdown ran out of fuel.  On January 26, Ontario had several days in a row of sub-2000 case numbers, and the graph of case numbers clearly show a peak.

On January 12, Ford made a liar of himself by announcing a thirty day period of house arrest for the province.  The “knock your socks off” modelling by his luckless medical advisers showed as many as 20,000 cases per day by February 14^th.  The model was obsolete before it was presented as case numbers began dropping the weekend before the announcement of provincial house arrest on the basis of the modelling.  This was the second time the modellers were completely wrong, the first being November 12 when they forecasted 6500 cases per day by December 15, and were off by a factor of three.

Ontario no longer publishes hospitalization, ICU and “on ventilator” statistics, which means those numbers are embarrassing to the modellers, and explodes the case for the shutdown and house arrest.

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Trudeau owes Biden a favor?

Vincent J. Curtis

25 Jan 21

What kind of moron says that Trudeau owes Joe Biden a favor because Biden shafted Alberta?  One who doesn’t do his research, or have any sense of proportion, it turns out.  For starters, Geoffrey Stevens, who declared this because Biden cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline,  forgot about the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion that will carry Alberta crude to Vancouver, and from there to China.  So much for saving the world from Alberta’s crude oil.

To think this character is teaching the next generation of journalist, and the current crop is none too good!

Stevens would make a liar of Trudeau, officially, since Trudeau did say he would fight for the pipeline, (but not too hard).  As for meeting Paris Accord requirements, the U.S. is the only country that bettered its Paris Accord targets, thanks to the use of natural gas derived from Trump-supported fracking.  Stevens should have done his research on this, and on this item: that Canada only produces 1.5 percent of world CO2 emissions.  Devastating Alberta’s economy to reduce that figure to 1.0 percent is futile for world CO2 emissions and fatal to Canada ever getting to a balanced budget in a reasonable way, and harmful to Canada’s balance of trade with the U.S.

Green technology? Spare me!  Look at brown-out California if you want the best possible scenario for the success of green technology.  They only work if you have a nat gas generating station waiting on line for the inevitable failures of wind and solar.

The guy who won from the Keystone cancellation was Warren Buffet, owner of railroads.  I think Biden was returning a favor to Buffet and not thinking of Justin at all.

The only satisfaction Trudeau got out of Biden’s decision is that the province that won’t return a single Liberal ever got royally screwed.  Stevens needs to lay off the Klimate Krazy Kool-Aid.

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Why did Trudeau Shaft Payette?

Vincent J. Curtis

23 Jan 21

Two things are obvious from the resignation of Julie Payette.  The first is that she was brought down by the whisperings of her staff.  The second is that Prime Minister Trudeau could have prevented this whole affair, but chose not to.

The real question is why Trudeau let Payette twist in the wind?

Could it be that Payette gave Trudeau difficulties when he wanted to prorogue Parliament?  On his effort to run a minority government during the pandemic without Parliament meeting until June 2021?  Did she indicate that the Conservatives might be asked to form a government if Trudeau asked for Parliament to be dissolved and an election called?

We’ll never know.  The drama teacher knows how to stick to the script, and it’s unlikely that Payette will talk for quite some time.

The fatal criticisms of Payette were uniquely womanly.  She and her chief of staff created as “toxic work environment,” when everybody is entitled to a “safe and secure work environment.”  (Only in Ottawa!)  Some staff were made to cry as a result of “verbal abuse.”  Rather than request a transfer out of their comfortable billets in Rideau Hall, the Ottawa swamp creatures knew how to complain to gain revenge, and they did.

Trudeau could have acted to protect Payette, but chose not to.  He could have blocked the appointment of a commission that would fully ventilate the complaints of the discontented and that would reach the fatal, progressive conclusion.

Now Trudeau is waking up to the realization that Payette’s resignation is redounding against him, since he personally chose her without vetting.

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Christianity v. Progressivism

Vincent J. Curtis

22 Jan 21

RE: uKnighted against racism.  Students of St. Thomas More R.C. Secondary School have organized an ad hoc group that intends to fight racism.  Hamilton Spectator of today’s date.  (The Knights is the school's team name, hence the play on uKnighted)

I find student activism against racism to be strange and disturbing.  Why should high school students nowadays be concerned about it?  Do they find it in their midst, or is this a concern about the wider world?

Christianity has preached against racism since its beginning, millennia before racism was a thing.  Jesus and the Samaritans, St. Paul on slavery, and the Council of Jerusalem of 50 A.D. all implicitly repudiated racism.  My earliest recollection of racism was the summer of 1963 when Spectator headlines screamed KKK atrocities.  The condemnation of Israel by the U.N. in 1974 as a racist country put the word into the popular lexicon.  Racism, and to be a racist, has been condemned continuously for the last fifty years.  Yet, it persists?  Why?

It must be that the root of racism is a component of human nature, and it requires the power of rationality to overcome it.  Christianity’s rationale is that we are all created in the image and likeness of God, and our focus is on the person as individual, not person as exemplar of group, or class, or race, all of which are incidental to character.  Progressivism offers no rationale reason opposing racism.  It serendipitously, for today, holds racism to be evil a priori when practiced by white people, and the internal contradictions of that proposition are obvious.  Progressivism's condemnation is pre-rational and emotional.  It is also inconsistent since eugenics and the work of Margaret Sanger were borne in the progressivism of the 1920s.)

This is what concerns me: is it progressivism that motivates the students, or a Christian response to observed phenomenon?

After fifty years of inculcation, racism ought not to exist in maturing young people.

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Let’s all hate Trump together now

Vincent J. Curtis

20 Jan 21 

One sign that big media not only hate Trump but also fear him is that they can’t give the devil his due.  In the last year of his presidency, Trump negotiated the normalization of relations between Israel and four Islamic states: Bahrain, UAE, Sudan, and Morocco.  He also negotiated a peace deal between Serbia and Kosovo.  Trump was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times in 2020, and was awarded the Order of Mohammed by the King of Morocco.

You don’t hear about this in the big media because it doesn’t fit the narrative.

The world outside the reach of big media is mystified by Trump’s loss to a senile fool who dared not campaign for fear of exposing the true extent of his advancing mental infirmity.  Well, they aren’t mystified.  They understand political corruption and are fully on board with the belief that Trump lost to fraud.  But they also understand and respect power, like the power to overthrow a man like Trump.

No one in the wider world believes that Trump was repudiated by the American people for the likes of his successor.  The Middle East and Far East respect Trump, but they respect power also, especially illegitimate power.

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Slobbering over Freeland

Vincent J. Curtis

19 Jan 21

RE: Trends that should worry Freeland.  Column by Torstar typist and Ottawa bureacu chief Heather Scofield.  Appeared in today’s Spectator.

When it comes to slobbering journalism, the piece by Heather Scofield on Chrystia Freeland was worthy of a basset hound.

“There’s no doubt Canada desperately needs to see some growth, and Freeland has committed to doing what she can with her fiscal levers to amplify the rebound and using stimulus money of up to $100 billion to rebuild the economy in a way that makes it grow even faster,”  she writes. There’s a triple redundancy in this statement, the two most obvious being stimulus and growing even faster, since that’s what stimulus is supposed to do.  But that $100 bills are doing triple duty since that’s what’s supposed to make the economy recover at all.

Freeland is responsible for “embracing clean technology, cutting emissions, creating one million jobs, investing in the social sector, infrastructure and training, beefing up pandemic support for workers and businesses, helping personal-support workers, enhancing homebuyers’ incentives, and reducing the deficit.”  Is this pretending that Freeland is Wonder Woman 21, or is Scofield sleeping through copy typing a Liberal press release?  Freeland’s just a bloody Finance Minister, how is she supposed to cut emissions, or embrace technology?  If anybody knows how to do all that, call Ottawa, and every other capital in the world; they’d all like to know.

Enough with the slurping and the dripping tongue.  If Freeland had a big ‘C’ for party affiliation, I’m certain Scofield would be treating her like Sarah Palin.

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Tales from the crypt

Vincent J. Curtis

19 Jan 21

RE: How America can Recover form the Plague of Trumpism and Its Brutal Aftermath. Hamilton Spectator op-ed of this date by Henry A. Giroux.  Giroux holds the McMaster University chaired professorship in the public interest.  He’s written a book entitled “Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis.  Sounds exhausting.  Considering Giroux is an old white guy, his views on race, politics, and everything else he writes about are highly suspect by his own lights.  But whatever, Giroux is exempt from the ramifications of his ideology.  You aren’t.

I see the Spectator has dug up its old correspondent from the planet Neptune for another exercise in empty verbosity, calumny, and hate.  I know these events happened on Neptune and not earth because on earth no one beat a police officer to death during the surge into the U.S. Capital in Washington.  Excrement was not smeared on the walls.  But Capitol police did shoot to death a 34 year old female veteran of the USAF.

On earth, big media and big tech were decidedly anti-Trump, and tried throughout his term to destroy him and everyone around him.  If it weren’t for big tech and its big money, Joe Biden would still be living in Delaware.  The poor, the working class, and minorities faired far better economically under Trump than they ever did under the sainted Obama or Bush 43.  Funny, but the names of Biden and Harris appear nowhere in this heaping helping of hate, another sign it’s Neptune being spoke of, not earth.

The Spectator dug up its one-trick pony, and he did his trick: the ex-pat Yank hates America unreservedly.  There was no mention of Biden because the author would choke having to say something nice.

Around here, in Foothills, we bury our horses deep, because otherwise the grizzlies will try to dig them up.  Bury this one-trick pony so deep, not even critters can smell the rotting corpse.

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A test of sincerity

Vincent J. Curtis

18 Jan 21

Every day for the next month is a test of Premier Doug Ford’s sincerity, and even hisintelligence.  Ever since the press conference in which Ford announced a province-wide house arrest, the number of COVID cases has declined.  The justification for house arrest and the thirty day extension of his “temporary, one-time” shutdown that began December 26 is fast disappearing.

Ford’s modellers must be jinxed.  On November 12^th, they predicted 6500 cases per day by December 15, but Ontario came nowhere near that.  Didn’t matter, more forecasts were said to show a collapse of Ontario’s health care system, and so the province-wide shutdown was announced.  As predicted, the case rate actually increased as people were forced to congregate with infected persons in consequence of the restrictions.

In a panic at the rising numbers, a new set of modelling was released that forecasted as many as 20,000 cases per day by February 14^th.  This precipitated the house arrest order and thirty day extension of the “temporary, one-time” shutdown.  But beginning the weekend prior to that fateful Tuesday, the case numbers stabilized and began to fall.  They are now consistency at or below the 3000 per day range and show no sign of climbing to 20,000.

Is Ford sincere about imposing no more restrictions than are necessary?  Can he read the numbers and spot not only the trend, but the vast disparity between the actual data and the forecasts his alleged experts gave him?

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A tale of two stories

Vincent J. Curtis

16 Jan 21 

This is a tale of two stories and the disparate editorializing in the way in which they were covered.

First we have the Bloc Quebecois questioning Trudeau’s new Minister of Crashing Airplanes about his former association with the Muslim Brotherhood.  This is a moral outrage, apparently.  Omar Alghabra is a poor, defenseless immigrant who just happens to be a Minister of the Crown.  After some ruminations, the editors concluded, however, that this foul treatment of a Muslim is just cynical electioneering, a preparation for the expected election in the spring.

Then we have the umpteenth story of Erin O’Toole denouncing the so-called “far-right,”  and saying it has no place in the Conservative party.  Since the media considers Antifa “left-leaning,” we have no idea what “far-right” even means.  Turns out, the origin of the story was a fund-raising letter by the Liberal party that accuses O’Toole’s Conservatives of harboring un-Liberal views.  But rather than dismiss the story as a foul, cynical, cheap-shot intended for the expected election in the spring, the story airs the lurid details of the accusation as if they had plausibility.  Plausible – as in O’Toole was the next Trump. (if only!)  It story is treated as straight-up news.

There was a singular lack of condemnation in the story, quite the opposite of coming to the rescue of a hapless Trudeau minister.

But the Spectator being a rump paper of the Toronto Star, this sort of editorial bias is to be expected.

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Follow the science

Vincent J. Curtis

17 Jan 21

How many times have we heard the command: “Follow the science”?  Well, let’s do just that.  A few weeks ago, I challenged the Spectator (and everybody else!) to find the scientific studies which showed the effectiveness of lockdowns in controlling the spread of COVID-19.  After ten months, there ought to be at least one.  It was, and is, my belief that restrictions did nothing, except perhaps promote the spread, at least initially.  It turns out that there is now a study ready for publication by authors who are connected with Stanford University Medical Department.

The paper is entitled, “Assessing Mandatory Stay-at-Home and Business Closure Effects on the Spread of COVID-19” and was written by Eran Bendavid, Christopher Oh, Jay Bhattachary, and John I.A. Ioannidis.

This is what they found: “Conclusions:  While small benefits cannot be excluded, we do not find any benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs (i.e. Non-pharmaceutical interventions).  Similar reductions in case growth may be achievable with less restrictive interventions.”  NPI is the term they used for lockdown restrictions as a means of controlling spread.

Let’s follow the science.  The findings are that lockdowns are worthless for controlling spread.  But they do wreck the economy and cause other medical, psychological, and social ills to the population as a whole.  Their arbitrary and, as it turns out senseless, unscientific rules and enforcement are testing our belief in the rule of law.

The scientific conclusion is obvious: end the lockdowns now!  Follow the science!

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A little mouse of truth

Vincent J. Curtis

16 Jan 21 

RE: Ford ousts MPP who called for end to lockdown.  Report by Shawn Jeffords of The Canadian Press. 

Premier Ford was utterly wrong to cancel a Tory MPP who called for an end to the lockdown.  He was not spreading misinformation and was certainly not being irresponsible.  Roman Baber, MPP, for was arguing his case on the basis of inconvenient information and science, which is the responsible thing to do.

That lockdowns after about two weeks are counterproductive to the health of the population as a whole was conclusively established last April by, among others, Dr. Scott Atlas of the Hoover Institution, whose findings were published in respectable journals in the U.S.  The truth in the argument is found, for example, in British Columbia where the excess deaths from drug overdoses alone was nearly double the number of COVID deaths in that province when last reported in November.  Never mind the other illnesses that go untreated and undiagnosed because of the lockdown and the fear that supports it.

Premier Ford is not infallible and neither are his medical advisors.  Ontario is still a representative democracy, and the Ontario legislature is not a Soviet Duma.  Mr. Baber speaks for a lot of people, and is not subject to cabinet solidarity.  Mr. Baber’s respectable argument ought to be met with respectable counter-arguments by Mr. Ford’s medical advisors.  That Ford cancelled Mr. Baber is a sign of the weakness of the case for locking the province down.  Let loose a little mouse of truth, and the mightiest of potentates go frisking in fear.

Doug Ford is an embarrassment to conservatives who believe in free speech, the Charter, and the rule of law.  He is the one who needs ousting.

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Global Warming War Heating Up

Vincent J. Curtis

15 Jan 21

RE: 2020 sets another global temperature record.  AP report by Seth Borenstein.

The pandemic must be getting near to the end because other parts of the culture war are resuming.  The article at reference is superficially a report about findings by respected U.S. government agencies, but it’s really another mortar shell in the battle over culture.  It isn’t hard to see the fallacies in the reporting.

First off, the years 1934 and 1936 are far and away the hottest on record in North America.  Those were the years of the dust bowl, and good data remains in the hands of NOAA from that period.  But they aren’t said to be ‘global’ records, because weather stations either didn’t exist or were few and far between in Africa, Central and South America, and much of Asia in that era.  So the global temperature record begins in 1950.  What is significant here is that from 1940 to 1978 global temperatures declined, to the point where climate experts feared a coming ice age.  Then, things got warmer.

The claim in the article is that 2020 was the warmest year “on record.”  Except that some agencies say that 2016 was, and some say it’s a tie.  Withal, this means that 2017, 2018, and 2019 were cooler than both.  Hence when Michael Mann, Penn State University professor of climate science, and inventor of the hockey stick graph, is quoted as saying, “another year, same story – record global warmth.” what he’s saying is fallacious.  Temperatures aren’t rising every year, and every time they fall a little it calls for a scientific explanation, which isn’t forthcoming from him.

Let me observe that Professor Mann didn’t say, “record global temperatures,” he said “record warmth” which is ambiguous and unscientific because temperature is what is measured, not warmth.  He ought to know this, so why was he deliberately ambiguous?

The allegation is that the pandemic year, when the world stayed home, is the hottest on record.  Seems like an argument for natural variation, but to say that can get you culturally cancelled.

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Reducing chances of U.S. violence in Canada

Vincent J. Curtis

14 Jan 21

 

RE:  What Canada can de to reduce chances of U.S.-mob style violence in Canada.  An Op-ed written by Robert Danisch, an associate professor and chair, department of Communication Arts, University of Waterloo; and William Keith, professor, rhetoric and communication, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Appeared in today’s Hamilton Spectator.

If this article by Robert Danisch and William Keith teaches anything, it’s that whatever the Left accuses you of doing – that’s precisely what they themselves are doing.

The object of the piece was to make Canada safe for Trudeau-style progressivism.  It begins with an error in logic.  It claims that polarization is the product of specific forms of rhetoric.  This is wrong; it’s precisely backwards.  The polarization already exists and the rhetoric merely reflects it.  If the polarization didn’t already exist, the rhetoric would have no resonance.

Their appeals to reason are exposed when they name specific examples.  The appeals to strong civility and to consciously choose to avoid rhetoric that leads to violence are code for censorship and cancellation.

The authors single out as examples of those who indulge in dangerous, divisive rhetoric are Rebel News, Gavin McInnes, Erin O’Toole, and Doug Ford.  Conservatives all.  When Justin Trudeau says to Alberta, “I’m going to destroy your livelihood because oil is immoral” that’s okay because he said it calmly and politely; but if Alberta responds in anger, that’s bad according to the authors.  That Trudeau wasn’t interested in persuasion is missed.  Of course, Trump and his supporters are without question evil incarnate, never mind how divisive this position is.

When progressives engage in identity politics, that’s not divisive, even though division into separate groups is at its core.  When conservatives employ for their purposes the successful tactics of progressives, well, that’s extraordinarily wrong.

The authors understand neither Canada nor America.  With the exception of Black Lives Matter violence that Canada experienced at the same time as the U.S., Canada won’t experience political violence because we lack a messianic figure, like Trump.  The only ones capable of organizing violence are groups of the Left.

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Police to enforce province-wide house arrest

Vincent J. Curtis

13 Jan 21

I don’t know whether to feel sorry for Ontarians who have been put under house arrest for the good of the health care system and octogenarians everywhere, or for the incompetent tyrants who are running the province and who are about to get their comeuppance.

On Tuesday, the doctors advising Premier Ford said that another turn of the screw was necessary because there might be as many as 20,000 cases per day by February 14^th.  Keep that in mind, it’s this or 20,000 cases per day.

The problem is that the latest surge seems to have peaked.  Case count fell over the weekend, and on the day of the announcement the daily count fell below 3000.  It was again below 3000 the day after, i.e. today. This will be the second time the doctor-modellers grossly overestimated future case numbers in order to justify lockdown measures.  The last time was November 12^th, when they forecasted 6500 cases per day by December 15^th, and got barely to a third of that.  Ontario still has yet to reach two-thirds of that projection even now, and the numbers appear on the decline.

The most painful part of this for Ontarians ought to be that you get the government you deserve.

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Ford declares province-wide house arrest

Vincent J. Curtis

12 Jan 21

 We don’t let mathematicians dispense medical advice, even if they have a Ph.D. in Statistics.  So, why are we letting medical doctors play statisticians and actuaries, and letting them shutdown Ontario?  When Doug Ford said on December 21^st that the provincial shutdown would be “a temporary, one time measure” he lied, and I said he was lying at the time.

The doctors advising Ford make worrisome noises about case loads being above 6,000 a day and of the imminent collapse of the healthcare system - and we believe them?  Why?  They’ve said it before and were wrong before!  On November 12, these same people said that starting from a base of 1500 per day, Ontario would be having 6500 cases per day by December 15^th.  They were utterly wrong, by a factor of three.  Why should we believe such demonstrated incompetence now?

Last April, Ontario had 3504 ICU beds, of which 2811 were equipped with ventilators.  On Tuesday, January 12^th, Ontario reported 2903 cases province-wide, 385 in ICU and 262 on ventilator.  That’s ten percent utilization.  And in two weeks the system is going to be overwhelmed? Nonsense!

After eighteen days of shutdown, the incubation period is over, and daily cases look like they’re beginning to drop.  They ought to be dropping.  So, the only thing that justifies a “state of emergency” is modelling, and we’ve seen how good they are with modelling.

Heads need to roll!

At the press conference in which Premier Ford announced house arrest as the latest turn of the screw, the Premier had the medical professionals justify why it was necessary.

In explaining, the great worry of the medical professionals was that the pandemic would cause the collapse – of the health care system.  Where they work.  Never mind your life, it’s their life they want to keep orderly.  But they admitted something else.  They admitted that the shutdown isn’t working, and that’s why we need another turn of the screw, namely house arrest.

For some reason, everyone simply assumes that lockdowns will control the spread of the virus.  But the medicos at the conference spent a great deal of time explaining why they didn’t, and aren’t.  They determined that one third of the people had violated the shutdown protocols at least once over Christmas.  These lockdown measures won’t work unless everyone complies completely all the time.

In short, their control measures won’t work because the level of compliance they need to work is simply too great.  One third break the rules once causes the edifice to collapse.  Stop bitching and scolding, that’s human nature and the humans have been putting up with just-this-once promises for ten months now.

What are you going to do – throw them all in jail?  The irony of that is too much!

The shutdown is supposed to work – in theory.  And in theory, we could have 20,000 cases per day by Valentine’s Day.  News flash: ideologies don’t work in the real world.  Ford needs to make the ends and means more practical.

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Rotting fish heads, lousy models, and horse manure.

Vincent J. Curtis

9 Jan 21

The spate of discoveries that insiders, both political and medical, have not been following the spirit of the shutdown has caused outrage.  One law for thee, and another for me, they seem to be saying.  But they’re saying something else: that the shutdown is horse manure.

The professionals and the insiders understand the statistics, and that’s why they’re taking trips abroad.  They also understand that the statements intended to keep the public in a panic are horse manure.

Take for instance the statement from Dr. Barbara Yaffe, Ontario Associate Medical Officer of Health, who said, “We’re in a very serious situation…We don’t want ICUs overwhelmed.”  As of April 30, 2020, Ontario had 3,504 ICU beds, of which 2,811 were equipped with ventilators.  On January 9, 2021, Ontario reported 362 COVID cases in ICU, of which 244 were on ventilator.  That’s roughly ten percent utilization.  Look carefully at what Dr. Yaffe said; both sentences are true insofar as one expresses an opinion and the other a wish, but they aren’t logically related to each other - though meant to imply a connection by juxtaposition.

Then Doug Ford says, “When you see the modelling, you’ll fall off your chair.”  The last model was released November 12, and forecasted a five percent per day rate of growth, with 6500 cases per day expected by December 15.  That proved laughably false, and not one day was the forecast even close.  So why should we have confidence that these next models are any better?  Crickets from both a compliant media and from Premier Ford. 

The insiders know that the people at the top are out of their depth.  That’s why some are taking vacation.

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Ford Lied: We called it

Vincent J. Curtis

8 Jan 21

RE: Ford promises new restrictions

On December 21^st, Premier Doug Ford announced the forthcoming shutdown – and lied through his teeth.  He said the shutdown would be “a temporary, one-time measure” that would last 28 days.  The empirical evidence was, and is, that lockdowns promote transmission.  You may not understand why – the doctors certainly don’t – but you just have to look at the cases curve and watch the case numbers rise as the lockdown becomes stricter.  Ford was bound to increase cases and, therefore, committed to tighten more whether he understood it then or not.

On Friday, it happened.  Ford made plain that he lied on December 21 by announcing that more restrictions are in the offing.  But that doesn’t matter, because his lie about one-time and temporary is founded upon another lie: that our health care system will collapse if he doesn’t.

Hospitals are looking for business.  In April 2020, the Ontario government stated that it had 20,354 acute care beds in the province and 3,504 critical care beds, of which 2,811 were equipped with ventilators.  On January 8^th, Ontario reported 1,446 hospitalized with COVID, 369 in ICU, and 250 on ventilator.  Look at the numbers: Ontario’s health care system is nowhere near collapse from COVID.

Are health care workers stressed?  Yes, they are – because they have been indoctrinated to be.  Tell someone often enough that he looks unwell, and worry about his health, and eventually he’ll start to feel unwell.

Stop the madness, and end the shutdown now!

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Lockdown madness continues

Vincent J. Curtis

7 Jan 21

RE: Quebec to impose first curfew amid huge growth in pandemic

RE: Ontario to delay school reopenings to Jan 25

As readers of thi blog are aware, I have been warning against lockdown measures for quite some time.  In August, I warned against mandating the wearing of ineffective masks, on the grounds that wearing them would create a false sense of security.  Mask mandates coincided with the start of the second wave.  On December 17, I warned against a pending Ontario shutdown on the grounds that the empirical evidence was that case rates went up after the imposing of stricter control measures.  And now we’re deeper into that cycle.

The UK imposed a strict lockdown more than a month ago, and what happened?  They bred a new, more contagious strain of the virus, and increasing case rates are leading to even stricter lockdowns.  We are seeing the same in British Columbia and Alberta, stricter lockdowns precede higher case rates.  I said it would happen in Ontario, and lo and behold not only did case rates jump almost immediately by more than 1000 per day, but the daily rate is now 600 per day above that, about double the daily rate prior to the announcement of the provincial shutdown.  Quebec’s strict lockdown prior to Christmas bred higher case numbers, and now they’re into curfews, as if the virus would respect time.

This is the empirical evidence.  You can theorize why the facts are what they are, but facts are facts.  Another blindingly obvious fact is that lockdowns have yet to defeat the virus, and given what we know about other highly contagious viruses, lockdowns can never stop the progress of a pandemic infection.  Another reason general lockdowns can’t work is that they actually force people to congregate more!  If you limit stores that are open and times they are open, the same number of people have to go to fewer places and have a shorter period of time in which to do their business.  Then, people are forced to live for long periods of time in their residences breathing the same air as a contagious person.

How long is it going to be before the people in power recognize the trend in the empirical evidence?  Or are they enjoying their power so much that they don’t want to notice it?

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Georgia Senate Runoff: what it tells us

Vincent J. Curtis 

7 Jan 21

The Georgia Senate runoff underscores the existence of funny business in the 2020 general election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in that state.  Since this analysis is data driven, let’s put the figures out there:

Trump                                     Perdue                                     Loeffler 

2,461,837                                2,462,617 (General)

                                                2,204,574 (Runoff)                 2,185,674 (Special)

 

 Biden                                      Ossoff                                     Warnock

2,474,507                                2,374,519 (General)               

                                                2,241,340 (Runoff)                 2,260,296 (Special)

In my earlier piece on “Weird Voting in Georgia” I said that on the basis of previous patterns and population growth, the generic Republican presidential candidate should get around 2,1 million votes, while the generic Democrat candidate should get around 1.9 million.  As we see, Trump increased his vote total by 360,000, while Joe Biden increased the Democrat total by an astonishing 600,000.

In the Senatorial general election, Perdue did slightly better than Trump, besting him by 780 votes.  Clearly, practically every Trump voter also voted for Perdue.  On the Democrat side, Biden bested Ossoff by almost 100,000 votes.  Clearly, a lot of Democrats who voted for Biden did not also vote for Ossoff in the general election.  Ossoff lost to Perdue in the general election, but because Perdue did not obtain the required 50+ % of the total vote, a runoff was declared between only Perdue and Ossoff.

The runoff was highly contested, and literally hundreds of millions of dollars was spent on the two senate races.  Control of the senate was in play, and big Democrat donors from Silicon Valley wanted to cement complete Democrat control of the federal government by winning these two races.

Nevertheless, despite all the hype and national attention, the vote totals fell from 2020 general election heights.  Perdue’s vote tally fell by nearly 260,000 votes, while Ossoff’s fell by about 133,000.  Because Ossoff’s vote fell by much less than Perdue’s, Ossoff squeaked by Perdue in the runoff to win the seat.  Interestingly, Perdue’s tally (as well as Loeffler’s) closely approximates the expected generic Republican vote total.

In the special election between Loeffler and Warnock, Warnock prevailed more easily than Ossoff did.  Warnock pulled in 19,000 more votes thanOssoff, while Loeffler pulled in 20,000 fewer votes than Perdue did.

The Ossoff and Warnock results of 2021 reflect the true, solid Democrat vote in the state, that being 2.25 million; and Perdue and Loeffler the true, solid Republican vote at 2.20 million  So, where did Biden find 220,000 votes more than the generic Democrat base?  Biden campaigned to used car lots with paid campaign staff scattered throughout to make it sound on camera like a real crowd.  Trump spoke to 35,000 people at a time in Georgia in the general, and to 25,000 people twice for Perdue and Loeffler for the runoff and special.  Enthusiasm for Biden does not explain the 220,000 votes that Joe got over other Democrats; and the 100,000 vote difference between Biden and Ossoff in the general looks especially peculiar.

I can understand the fall-off in enthusiasm among demoralized Republicans after the 2020 election, and the retention of enthusiasm among triumphant Democrats looking at the prospect of complete control of the government in Washington if both Ossoff and Warnock won their Senate races.  Trump is in a league of his own when it comes to voter enthusiasm.  So, where did Biden’s mysterious 100,000 excess over Ossoff come from?  It wasn’t due to enthusiasm for Biden.  Were there that many ballots with only Biden’s name on it?

The results of the 2021 Georgia runoff and special elections makes the result of 2020 look even weirder.

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Shameless Ideologues never learn

Vincent J. Curtis

6 Jan 21 

RE: The Pandemic and Fulfilling Hamilton’s Density.  Hamilton Spectator op-ed 6 Jan 21.

I was wondering when Shaker and Premi would put in an appearance.  You would think the pandemic would cause them to reconsider their theory of increasing population density.  You would think people would be less inclined to listen to stories of how much better society would be if we all lived closer together, unmasked.

Why is it that central planners all believe that 1970s Moscow is some kind of ideal to be aimed at?  This is Canada, and we love our space.  We love our own patch of green that belongs to no one else.  The most immediate folly in the densification that Shaker and Premi advocate is the lack of parking and road way for all the people crammed into tighter spaces.

Oh, cars are evil?  Sure, but I need mine to get to work.  Public transit?  Is that what this is about, more government control?  Here we go with more central planning needed to correct the mistakes of the first go-round of central planning.  The pandemic put paid to all sorts of mass transit, from planes to trains to buses.  It ought to put paid to the idea that living closer together is an obvious, unalloyed good for the masses, as Shaker and Premi believe.

Let the people decide what they want by way of housing.  The problem with central planning is that the planners lack the detailed information that only the free market has.

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Affirming the Marxist Orthodoxy

Vincent J. Curtis

6 Jan 21

RE: What the pandemic has taught us about BIPOC displacement.  Hamilton Spectator op-ed of 5 Jan 21.

I’m sure the poor quality of writing protected the public from reading the arrant nonsense offered by Sarah Adjekum in her piece on BIPOC displacement.  (BIPOC = black, indigenous, and people of color)  I have often commented on the poor quality of scholarship in the Humanities, and this article presents another worrisome example.

A Ph.D. thesis requires a much higher quality of writing than exhibited in the article, and I don’t think the author was trying to write down to her audience.  A thesis is written in pursuit of truth, and needs therefore to present facts is an objective manner.  But her article was replete with tendentious falsehoods that weren’t hard to spot.

For example, the statement that the occupation of the Foxgate property in Caledonia is “on the remaining Haldimand Land Tract, unceded Haudenosaunee land.”  The ceding of the land has been well documented, and objectivity requires acknowledgement of that, even if you sympathize with the illegal occupation.

Also lacking were figures showing how much more the downtrodden have suffered as a result of the pandemic.  The remarkable thing is that the homeless haven’t suffered.  One would think the homeless encampments would be breeding grounds of disease, and in this pandemic they haven’t been, anywhere.  Adjekum is challenged on basic facts, because she doesn’t have them.  Show me the figures.

Not a promising showing for a Ph.D. candidate in sociology.  But, hey, nowadays scholarship in the Humanities is all about affirming the orthodoxy, and she did that.

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Great minds thinking alike

Vincent J. Curtis

5 Jan 21 

RE: COVID-19 shows no sign of peaking in Hamilton.  Hannon Spectator, Page 1 story of today.

Readers of this blog will know that I made very specific warnings, starting on December 17^th, that another lockdown in Ontario would only increase the number of cases.  And that is how it is turning out.  I gave a mechanism for how lockdowns increase case numbers, and have since found a science author with a similar thesis.

William M. Briggs holds a Ph.D. in Mathematical Statistics and was formerly a professor at the Cornell Medical School.  On December 29^th, he wrote in his blog an article entitled, “Why lockdowns spread bugs faster than liberty.  Coronavirus Update XLVI.”   He observed three significant things.  First, lockdowns, as distinct from quarantines, force people to congregate.  Second, something like a lockdown occurs every winter when cold weather keeps people indoors and congregated, and these are known periods of high sickness transmission.  Finally, he observed that lockdowns are ineffective against extremely high transmissibility diseases..

When I called for Premier Ford to add real mathematicians and economists to his advisory team, this is the kind of advice I expected he would hear.  His doctor advisors are not experts in the math they think they are applying correctly, and are offering defective advice with a false sense of confidence 

Criticisms that cases continue to rise because of scofflaws is absolutely without foundation.

Eventually, the fire will burn all the wood available to it, and run out of fuel.  The same will happen with the current wave, lockdown or not.

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Ordinary Sailperson

Vincent J. Curtis 

9 Oct 20

It’s quite amazing how often senior command tries to crush morale in the ranks.  Years ago, the Royal Canadian Navy had some truly great toasts of the day, inherited from the Royal Navy. Then, senior brass changed them into something Presbyterian.

How would you like to toast, “To a bloody war or a sickly season.” (Began when the only way to get a promotion was for one’s superior to die.) “A willing foe and sea room.” (An Irishman must have thought of that one.) “To our wives and sweethearts – may they never meet!”?  These are great toasts.  These morale boosters were replaced with: “our nation,” “our navy,” and “our families” respectively.  What Ottawa priss needed to be placated that badly? Was sea duty not that important anymore?

Having been left alone for a while, it’s the navy’s turn to take another morale-crushing blow, with the institution of gender-neutral ranks.  Now, given the grip of Gender Identity Theory on the minds of progressive thinkers, you might wonder if Ottawa believes changing to gender neutrality better reflects the true, hidden, gender-fluidity among sailors.  Man, I feel like a woman, today!  Maybe this is their answer to the problem of getting more women in the navy – to abolish gender altogether and get enough sailors to identify as women.

Somehow, I don’t think navy brass is that clever.  Nevertheless, the new rank names go from ordinary seaman, able seaman, leading seaman, and master seaman, to ordinary seaperson, etc.  What?  Did I get that wrong?  Oh, yeah, its sailor third class, second class, first class, and master something.  Can’t you feel your morale rising there, sailor?

The funny thing is, these changes may have been implemented illegally.  Now, that would raise morale.  According to Rory Fowler, a retired light colonel and former military lawyer, the method of promulgation, a CANFORGEN, lacks the legal authority necessary to implement the changes.  Fowler claims the changes in rank designations has to be done by Order in Council, i.e. the Governor-General upon the advice of the cabinet has to order the changes.  It can’t be done on the say-so of a mere CDS or some bloke service commander.

An old naval saying goes, “When in trouble, make smoke.”  When word of the changes got out, grumbling began in the ranks.  Some aggrieved persons may have criticized them as political correctness run amuck, and the demise of another naval tradition.  Overheated naval brass exploded, bellowing, “There is no place in the service for sailors who subscribe to hateful, misogynistic, or racist beliefs.  If you cannot live by or support the values of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, then you cannot defend them.”

Er, those values include (Section 2b) freedom of thought, belief, and expression; but the Deputy Commander who slammed a particular set of beliefs, thoughts, and their expression, I doubt, is about to follow his own reasoning to its logical conclusion.

In contrast, the army maintains that it is their job to protect democracy, not to practice it.

One wonders what Nelson at Trafalgar thought of the French.  Did he entertain hateful, racist beliefs, or did he just kill in cold blood?  What about those sailors escorting convoys to Britain against German U-boats?  You know, the Boche, Huns, Krauts, Fritz?  In those days, Germans, French, English, Irish, Scots, Welsh, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Swede, Finn, Russian were all different races.  Was racism in those days acceptable, or do we pull down the statue to Harry DeWolf because he was mean to Germans?  Killing them, in fact.

Most sailors I know love women.  Wives and sweethearts, may they never meet, remember?  What they don’t like is something out of place.  Having had beaten into them the right way of doing things, it runs against the grain to be told that they are now wrong, and it’s the new way or the highway.

Morale crushing changes are relieved by the incompetence with which they were carried out.

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The Hannon Spectator

Vincent J. Curtis

3 Jan 21

RE: Letter to Readers. Hamilton Spectator of 2 Jan 21.  It was written by the three new proprietors of Torstar Corp, Liberals all, one of whom is former Ontario Premier David Peterson.  You would not believe the sickeningly sweet letter penned by the trio, speaking of trust, their being humbled, etc.  But they still made a bad business decision by moving the Spectator offices from the downtown to a remote industrial/commercial area on the south east mountain, just south of the juncture of the Linc and the RHVP.

Actions speak louder than words.  The words of the new Spectator proprietors struck me as slobbering twaddle.  The action shows that they know nothing about running a newspaper.

After giving up 44 Frid Street, the logical place for new Spectator offices was Jackson Square.  Never mind that’s geographically where it all began, it’s still where it’s at in Hamilton.  Downtown is where the action is.  Downtown is still the city’s central business district, with the hockey arena, city hall, the courts, the farmer’s market, and much else all within walking distance.  It’s where you feel the city.

The new premises, 211 Pritchard, is a soulless industrial-type mall in the midst of other soulless industrial malls.  No foot traffic.  No sidewalks.  No people, only cars.  Instead of proximity to the farmer’s market, the new offices are closer to Farmer Al’s Market.  Instead of being on top of AHL hockey, the new offices are closer to the Elfrida tractor-pull grounds.  But if Spec employees want to moonlight as contractors or landscapers, the office puts them next to their suppliers.  It’s not the Hamilton Spectator anymore, it’s the Hannon Spectator.

The beating heart of the city is downtown, not in the collection of industrial malls on the south east Mountain that go dark and empty at night.  The city’s daily newspaper needs to be downtown.  Hopefully, it will open a bureau in Jackson Square.

The cheap rent on Prichard is going to cost the paper its soul.

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Weird Voting in Georgia

Vincent J. Curtis 

4 Jan 21

The media was atwitter with the release of an alleged conversation between President Trump and Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffenspeger.  Trump was supposed to have asked the Secretary to “find him some votes,” as if that indicated a demand for corrupt action on the part of the Secretary.  Nobody is asking who recorded the conversation, who leaked it, why they leaked it, or when the conversation occurred.  This means that the answers to those questions tend to undermine the narrative that Trump asked someone to act corruptly on his behalf.

Trump has every right to be concerned about corruption in the Georgia president election of 2020.  For context, here are the results of the last four presidential elections in Georgia:

Georgia                       2008                2012                2016                2020

Republican                  2,048,754        2,070,221        2,089,104        2,461,837

Democrat                    1,844,123        1,761,761        1,877,963        2,474,507

John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Donald Trump all received between 2.05 and 2.09 million votes, gradually rising as the voting population of Georgia slowly rose.  The generic Republican vote for 2020 on the basis of the trend would be around 2.1 million votes.  Trump got 362,000 more votes than that.  He increased his vote by 18 percent over 2016.  This is much more than expected on the basis of trends, and clearly indicates rising popularity in the state.  He campaigned a lot in the state in 2020.

Let’s turn to the generic Democrat vote.  As we’ve seen in other states, Barack Obama, the Democrat nominee in 2008 and 2012 was at his most popular in 2008.  He won 1.84 million votes in 2008, but fell to 1.76 million votes in 2012.  Hillary Clinton carried the Democrat banner in 2016, and did slightly better than Obama did in 2008, gaining 1.88 million votes.  Allowing for gains in population, we can estimate the generic Democrat vote for 2020 as 1.91 million.

Given that Trump increased the Republican vote by nearly 400,000, one would expect that some of those votes came at the expense of the Democrat rival.  But that’s not what happened in 2020.  Joe Biden increased the Democrat vote total over 2016 by 600,000 votes.  He pulled in 2.47 million votes.  That means a million more people voted in Georgia in 2020 than did in 2016.

The weird thing about Biden’s numbers is that most of the increase came from Fulton County.  On election night, early in the morning of November 4^th, Trump had a lead of 200,000 votes, and only a few counties around Atlanta had not reported.  Fox News refused to call the state for Trump.  They must have known something was up, for 200,000 was the standard margin of victory by Republicans since 2008.  By morning, Trump’s enormous lead had disappeared.

It took days, but votes kept being found for Biden, and finally the Democrat overtook Trump ever so slightly.  Nobody could explain how this happened.  There were signs of corruption, and a state legislative committee investigated, finding inexplicable practices video recorded at the counting center.  In Atlanta, people were told to leave and go home for the evening due to a burst pipe.   Counting would stop and resume in the morning.  But video shows that’s not what happened.  Once supervision left, suitcases of ballots were pulled out from hiding places and run through the counting machines, sometimes repeatedly.  But the feckless election officials didn’t step in and cry “foul!”

There is plenty of evidence of fraud on an enormous scale, and the outsized vote totals is the sign of it.  They cry out for an explanation.  Why could Joe Biden, who demonstrated no support at all in the state, generate so much more enthusiasm than Obama in 2008 and Hillary in 2016?  It can’t all be due to Trump’s unpopularity in the reliably Republican state, for he increased his total by 18 percent in 2020 over 2016.

This voting isn’t weird.  It stinks.

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Rape Culture collides with Gender Identity Theory

Vincent J. Curtis

2 Jan 21

RE: Rape Culture 'Continues to Persist' at Mac.  Hamilton Spectator of this date.  A rehash of old material combined with quotes from new people, one being the President of the McMaster Student's Union and the other aN Admin person acting suitably concerned.

With all the finger pointing going on, the pointers run the risk of poking each other in the eye.  Take Giancarlo Da-Ré, the president of McMaster Students Union.  He wants the Administration to Do Something, spend money, hire staff, etc.  In short, do things that cause student tuition to go up.

But as the president of the student’s union, Da-Ré represents in practically all instances both the perpetrator of sexual violence and the victim.  What is Da-Ré and the Students Union doing about the rape culture among their own, other than pass the buck?  Not much, it seems.  Deflect attention, make the right noises, etc.

Probing deeper, we run into the issue of sex and gender.  Arig al Shaibah, head of the Equity and Inclusion Office said, “Gender-based violence is not going away.”  To those who follow these things, practically every other word in that sentence has a loaded meaning.  Gender Identity Theory holds that gender is a subjective mental construct without physical reality, and so there is immediately the problem of what “gender-based” violence is, and how it is possible.  It might kill them to say that men rape women, for that would spoil their adhesion to Gender Identity Theory.  And so, for the uninitiated, we get mealy-mouthed references to “gender-based violence,” never mind that at last count there were 52 genders.

Finally, we get proof that basic English is lacking at Mac.  If something ‘continues to persist’, it persists, or it continues.

Pathetic!  This is Canadian university education in the Humanities at its finest.

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