Indian giving in Rome

Vincent J. Curtis

30 Mar 22

RE: ‘Those items, those artifacts…those are ours’: Vatican delegate.  By Kelly Geraldine Malone, The Canadian Press.  Published in the Hamilton Spectator 30 Mar 22.

If the aboriginal delegations went to Rome expecting the Pope to denounce the Church’s mission in the New World, they were disappointed.  What is the Church’s mission?

Well, the first mission is to bring the good news of Christ to the world.  Second, it has been to preserve and disseminate knowledge; and third, to be a civilizing influence on the world.  The aboriginal delegates went to Rome holding that it was wicked to have challenged their paganism, that they should have been left uneducated, and they should have been left in their Neolithic culture.  What is a European to make of such a position?

Between 400 A.D. and 1750 A.D., Europe saw the collapse of the Roman Empire under the pressure of barbarian invasions.  There followed the Migration Period, when the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes settled in Britain, the Franks and Burgundians settled in France.  Charles “The Hammer” Martel stopped the Islamic invasion of Europe from the south at the Battle of Tours in 732 A.D.  There followed Charlemagne, and the Viking scourge.  There were the Mongol invasions from the east, and the Islamic invasion from Turkey, finally stopped under the walls of Vienna when the Polish King John Sobieski destroyed the Turkish army in 1683 A.D.  There was the protestant reformation and the thirty years war, and finally, the Enlightenment.

Against this millennium of turbulence, the aboriginals of North America hold that the Europeans had no right to take over North America and disturb their Neolithic culture.  Where would they even get the moral reasoning to hold such a position?  Ironically, it can only come from European philosophy, and in particular Postmodernism, a central tenet of which is a complete absence of gratitude.  But some things never change.

When given a tour of the Vatican’s Ethnological museum, in which artifacts from their culture were on display, the reaction of the aboriginals was to engage in “Indian giving.” They claimed those artifacts as theirs.  Those artifacts likely wouldn’t exist today had the Vatican not acquired them, but never mind.  If you want reconciliation, Pope, you have to give those things to us; oh, and $30 million also.”

Reconciliation is a mugs game.  No amount of money and no amount of apologizing will satisfy.  It’s time for people of western civilization to realize it.

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Virus in wastewater: nothing to panic about

Editorializing in COVID news

Vincent J. Curtis

29 Mar 22

RE: COVID-19 cases are on the rise again in Hamilton.  “Wastewater surveillance to monitor virus missing at key time.”  By Joanna Frketich.  The Hamilton Spectator 29 Mar 22.

Let’s ramp up the panic again!  And to make sure people get the message, the article contains the following bit of editorializing: “Hamilton is missing a key tool used by the province to as an early warning system.”  No, it’s not!!

First, let’s be clear.  This wave is already fizzling.  It’s not going to have legs.

Dr. Elizabeth Richardson is rightfully skeptical about the “missing tool,” viral count in wastewater.  There is no cause-effect relationship between viral load in wastewater and case numbers because one really sick person can put as many viruses down the toilet as ten slightly sick people.  The ‘virus in wastewater’ is too remote an indicator anyhow to what really matters to spend public money on it.  If it worked perfectly it would only forecast rising case numbers by less than a week.

What matters is hospitalization and ICU usage.  But rising case numbers themselves precede rising hospitalization by ten days or so; and ICU usage about a week after rising hospitalization.  So, case number is the important leading indicator.  Viral load in waste water is unreliable in forecasting verified cases, and if nobody’s sick enough to get tested, then they certainly won’t be hospitalized.

On viral loading, Dr. Richardson is right.  If there are people pushing for virus in waste water analysis, you have to wonder what financial interests they have in the matter.

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Liberal-NDP alliance: Party of the Woke

Vincent J. Curtis

25 Mar 22

The country of Wokeistan awoke to find it was now governed by a formal political alliance between the Liberals and the party of the Wokers.  Somehow, in leaky Ottawa, the negotiations remained secret and undiscovered, until the alliance of the woke was revealed.  In retrospect, we should have thought something afoot when the party of the wokers took the side of the government against the truckers.

The latte-sippers realized they had a good thing going.  There were no point in spoiling avocado toast breakfasts in the Chateau Laurier with an unnecessary election.  Three and a half years of guaranteed high income, no heavy lifting and, when it’s all over, enough time in to retire on a good parliamentary pension.  Good deal!

The driving force behind the alliance is the poverty of the NDP.  They can’t afford to run another national election campaign and, given their new orientation away from labour and towards the humanities professors, their source of big money has dried up.

The promise that the Liberal government will move on pharmacare and denticare before 2025 relies on Prime Minister Hamlet overcoming his weakness of overpromising and not delivering.  The RCAF needs $21 billion by 2023 to acquire replacement fighter aircraft on the current schedule, already a decade behindhand.  The RCN needs to order its first replacement frigate before 2025, at a cost of $5 billion.  The CAF needs to be completely resupplied with war stocks of ammunition, weapons, and other gear that had been donated to Ukraine.

The credibility of the NDP is being shredded as we watch.  Jagmeet Singh is being treated as a fool on national media.  Calls by the Alberta NDP for a confidence vote against the UCP of Jason Kenney looks startlingly hypocritical.  The upcoming election in Ontario may feature an alliance between the provincial Liberals and NDP, leaving one wondering whether Steven Delduca or Andrea Horwath will end up on top!

No matter, those in Ottawa will do all right, Jack.

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Unpacking cow manure

What’s intermediate between is and isn’t? Scarsin’s folly

Vincent J. Curtis

24 Mar 22

RE: Caution urged as rules become choice.  By Joanna Frketich.  The Hamilton Spectator 24 Mar 22.

“Scarsin Forecasting showed two-thirds of a projected 26,600 spring infections could be prevented.”  There’s a lot of cow manure in that statement.  Let me unpack it for you.

First, statistics do not imply a cause-effect relationship among variables.  When Scarsin says, “Our model forecasts 26,600 infections between Mar 21 and June 20” but “this figure reduces to 8867 if we leave our masking coefficient unchanged” all this amounts to is fun with figures.  ‘Showing’ in the scientific sense didn’t occur.

There is no cause-effect relationship here, though the weak minded and less informed are invited to believe there is.  Belief is why Scarsin gets paid, astrologists too.  There might be far fewer cases than 26,600 for reasons not accounted for by Scarsin’s model.  Or far more should a new variant emerge.

In particular, Scarsin can have no cause-effect relationship between mask-wearing and spread of the disease because there isn’t one in real life.  Modelling mask wearing with disease spread is a mug’s game, but if you bury that in enough other manure you can’t particularize where the smell is coming from.  That’s the trick.

When Hamilton’s medical officer of health, Dr. Elizabeth Richardson says “we need to transition from requirement to choice,” perhaps she can explain what the intermediate steps are?  There’s either compulsion, or there isn’t.  Seem pretty clear to me.  Maybe Dr. Richardson could be asked to explain what’s between logical contradictories, and our understanding of logic can be added to.

Scarsin’s folly

It’s been widely reported that Scarsin Forecasting has forecasted 26,600 new cases of COVID in the Hamilton area this spring.  Let’s do a little math!.

Assuming spring to be 91 days long, to reach their figure there would have to be 292 new COVID cases per day for 91 days.  With a population of 550,000, Hamilton holds roughly 3.75 percent of Ontario’s population of 14.8 million.  If all of Ontario were suffering new cases at the rate that Scarsin predicts for Hamilton, Ontario would be seeing 7787 new cases per day, something not seen since the peak of the most recent wave of the pandemic.  Since pandemics do ebb and flow, to have an average rate of near pandemic peak levels, it means that some awful peak is coming if Scarsin’s forecasted number is correct.

Hamilton does not live in isolation, and that awful peak would have to be coming to Ontario as a whole also.

For the last four weeks, Ontario’s daily average case number has bounced around 2,000 per day.  At this rate, on average, Hamilton would experience 75 new cases per day, and in 91 days a total of 6825 cases, a quarter of Scarsin’s forecast.  Scarsin, advocating for continued mask mandates, argues that their 26,600 can be reduced to 8867 if masks are retained.  This is still much more than the Ontario average applied to Hamilton.

We have a right to ask if Scarsin isn’t generating elaborate looking panic porn that justifies the evident desires of those who pay them.

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Deep State take-out

Vincent J. Curtis

23 Mar 22

We see in the Paul Miller case a classic example of a deep-state take-out.  Damning information mysteriously comes into the possession of someone with power over the victim.  The information is not subject to cross-examination, so its veracity hasn’t been tested.  No matter, it is simply believed because it is too incredible not to be believed.

In Miller’s case, we don’t even know what that information is.  Miller speculated as to what it might be, but that speculation was denied.  And so, what the damning information is remains a complete mystery, but the determination is not: Miller has to go.  And he is gone.  Taken-out without his case being aired.  And that means without the judgement of the power over Miller being subjectable to questioning.  It was offered to be in Mr. Miller’s own interest that the damning information not be released.

If Miller were expelled from the NDP caucus and party on the grounds that he was an irredeemably deplorable, that might turn out badly for the power that expelled him, if, on examination, he wasn’t that irredeemably deplorable. And that the decision of the power was excessive, even vicious.  The power might have vested interests at play, and the expulsion was happily convenient for the power.  That’s probably the real reason for the mystery behind the take-out.

Mystery is how the deep state covers itself.  Protect sources and methods, you know.  And people get crushed mysteriously and without their day in court.

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Let’s make government misrule illegal instead

Vincent J. Curtis

22 Mar 22

RE: Ontario bill aimed at tackling border blockades.  Holly McKenzie-Sutter, The Canadian Press.

RE: Restrictions set to life at U.S.-Canada border crossing.  Jennifer Moore, The Hamilton Spectator.  22 Mar 22.

The government seems to have no problem with shutting down border crossing whenever they fell like it.  Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of COVID.  It doesn’t matter whose livelihoods they harm, if the government decides to shut down border crossing, that’s okay.

But don’t let anybody else try to do it, like in protest against government misrule.  Shutting down border crossing by truckers in February was in protest against especially ridiculous COVID rules that made no sense to anyone except the tyrants imposing them.  People’s livelihoods were in jeopardy if they didn’t comply with the tyrants commands.  Turn the government’s tactics on it, and suddenly there needs to be a law against it.

Not every protest is Marxist inspired.  Not every protest is simply to spread chaos or let off steam.  What made the truckers’ protests so dangerous to the government was that it was by serious people, for a serious purpose, and it was sustained.  These kinds of protests are the most dangerous to the government because they point unequivocally to government misrule, and misrule is something the government cannot admit to. (How many times did we hear, “They’ve made their point, now they should go home”?  Making a point wasn’t the purpose of the protest; it was to change a government policy, and until it changed, the protest would continue.  That’s called, redressing a grievance.)

The Ontario bill is intended to make certain emergency measures permanent, and that too is a dangerous sign.  Oh, it’s all well intended, until it gets abused.

Cutting off peaceful but effective means of protest precisely because it’s effective isn’t good for democracy.  Eventually, the only effective means of protest left are unpeaceful ones.

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School Board violates the law: Nobody cares.

Vincent J. Curtis

20 Mar 22

RE: School Board says masks still required.  By Kate McCullough, The Hamilton Spectator, 19 Mar 22.

Few people, and certainly not the Spectator, give a damn that the School Board is violating the rule of law by requiring that masks continue to be worn in schools.  Board Chair Dawn Danko admitted the Board doesn’t have the authority to continue with a mask mandate in violation of Ministerial orders and provincial law.  They’re going to do it anyway because they think it’s “right.”

The Board’s alleged escape hatch is to require of students to fill out an exemption form, which will be immediately granted.  Well, suppose the student refuses to fill out a form to exercise their God-given liberties?  Will the student who stands on his legal rights be suspended or expelled?  If the student refuses to leave the building, will the police be called to eject the offender?  On what charge – trespassing?

The Board’s actions cannot stand up in court, and they know it.  They’re counting on the brief period of their violation of law to get them through it.

If students don’t rebel en masse against this arbitrary and unlawful mandate of the Board, then it will prove that the pandemic panic worked: people are now conditioned to obey “safety” orders from crazy Karens with power.

What did H.L. Mencken say about exchanging liberty for safety, and about keeping the public alarmed?  Newsmen ought to know.

And they want to take our guns away!

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Why Defend Canada’s far north?

Vincent J. Curtis

18 Mar 22

RE: Invasion raises fears over threat to Canada’s north. By Jordon Press, The Canadian Press.  18 Mar 22.

In a taped announcement to members of the Canadian Armed Forces, Chief of Defense Staff General Wayne Eyre began with a land acknowledgement.  He declared that the place he was speaking from, National Defense Headquarters, was located on unceded Algonquin land.  The commander of the military that conquered, occupied, and enabled Canada to annex Algonquin territory was confessing Canada’s guilt in the whole affair.  By rights, Eyre admitted, the land didn’t belong to Canada.  It still belonged to the Algonquins.

So, why are we concerned with defending Canada’s far north?  That land wasn’t ceded by aboriginal peoples either.  Canada has no moral right to occupy it.  Why should we resist the occupation of that land by another white power when we have no moral right to it in the first place?  Wouldn’t this be just another example of the clash of competing white supremacisms?

Maybe we should simply let the Russians, or the Americans, occupy “Canada’s” far north and let them deal with the guilt feelings and land claims.  At least that won’t still be on our consciences.

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Board playing chicken

Vincent J. Curtis

17 mar 22

RE: Board shortens its masking rules.  By Kate McCullough.  The Hamilton Spectator 17 Mar 22

You have to wonder why the School Board is playing chicken with the Education Minister, and, frankly, with the rule of law.  After being slapped down by both Education Minister Steve Lecce and Premier Doug Ford for ordering a mask mandate in school through April 15, which is illegal, the Board is now lessening the offence by illegally extending it only to April Fool’s day.

Illegal?? Board Chair Dawn Danko admits that the Board does not have the authority to extend mandates beyond provincial limits.  So, what’s the game here? Is it sheer incompetence?  If they admitted lack the authority, why are they pretending to have it anyway?  There is a respect for the rule of law aspect to this.

The Board has the physical power to suspend and expel students who defy the illegal mandates of the Board, and by the time the matter is adjudicated, it will be moot.  The Board is playing a game of chicken with the provincial government and with its own students, those who defy the Board.  Never mind the Board recommendation to be lenient, a principal might just choose to follow his own drummer, just like the Board is.  Referring to an exemption policy that already exists, a policy that introduces bureaucratic barriers to freedom from tyranny, doesn’t make the mandate extension any less illegal.

What a mess!  Masks are now known as “facial decorations” because it is now recognized that the vast majority of them are useless.  Young people are the least at risk from COVID.  Yet the Board chooses this issue to challenge the rule of law in the course of virtue-signalling?  Stupid, and incompetent!!!

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Putin’s message to Russians

Vincent J. Curtis

13 Mar 22

In the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin argued that Ukrainians and Russians were really one people with a common language and a common heritage.  His “special military operations” in Ukraine were to ”denazify” Ukraine, and Russian troops would be welcomed with open arms.

What has happened to these “fellow Russians” in the course of the military operations?  Their resistance has been met with terror bombings of cities with artillery fire and rockets.  Civilians are targeted for killing as a means of breaking the will to resist.  Millions flee as refugees.  The mayors of captured towns are held as political prisoners instead of being allowed to flee.  The major cities of Kiev, Kharkov, and Mariupol are being reduced to rubble – all for the purpose of “denazifying” this place.

Putin’s message to Russians is this: it doesn’t matter that you’re Russian.  If you resist his will, you will be killed, imprisoned, and your homes and cities destroyed.  Law doesn’t matter.  Previous agreements don’t matter.  War crimes are laughable accusations.  What matters is his will.

What Putin is waging in Ukraine he could just as easily wage in Russia, by his own logic.

The question for Russians is on what can they rely that Putin won’t eventually turn his malignant gaze on them?  For how much longer can a dangerous killer like Putin be trusted with power?

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Ontario voted for this

Vincent J. Curtis

10 Mar 22

You can hear the howling about high gas prices all the way to Alberta.  My advice to disgruntled Ontarians is to shut up and learn to love the pain.  This is what you voted for.

The votes of Ontario put Justin Trudeau back into power.  Aside from COVID, the principle plank in the Liberal platform was a carbon tax as Canada’s means of saving the planet from carbon dioxide.  The object of the carbon tax was to make motor fuels so expensive that it was no longer economical to drive to Toronto to work.  People would stop driving regular cars, and embrace electric vehicles.  That was the plan.

World events hastened that plan along, and drivers in Ontario are now faced with the full consequences of their choice last October without EVs, without charging stations, without warning, and without novocaine.

Here’s a news flash.  Nothing Canada does to combat climate change (if you believe in that stuff) is going to matter a whit, but whatever is mandated (don’t you just love that word?) it will make life more expensive.  The higher fuel prices from a carbon tax is just happening faster than planned.

And with his new-found powers, Justin Trudeau has means of suppressing dissent.  Here’s another news flash: high commodity prices aren’t forever, but high taxes are.

Enjoy the high gas prices, Ontario, you voted for this last October..  You’re getting the government you deserved.

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Little Putins all

Vincent J. Curtis

11 Mar 22

RE: Hamilton’s public schools to keep masks on until April 15.  News item by Joanna Frketich and Kate McCullough.  The Hamilton Spectator, 11 Mar 22.

We see yet another exercise of arbitrary – and illegal – power by another set of crazy Karens.  Inside every crazy Karen, there’s a little Putin trying to get out.

The Hamilton Public Board’s order to keep masks on is completely illegal.  They have no authority or scientific basis, only an illegal use of force to back themselves up.  The power to expel or suspend students is illegal because the basis is capricious.  Sure, you can take them to court and kick their asses, but by that’s expensive and by the time the courts rule, the matter will be moot.

There never was any science behind masks.  Mask mandates were grasped because they provided a curtain to hide behind.  The logic of the first lockdown made ending it impossible.  Fifteen days to flatten the curve turned into detention until the virus was eradicated.  By July, the goal of eradication was obviously impossible.  The masses grew restless in the face of arbitrary detention and silly restrictions, like on outdoors activities..  Masking was a way of hiding the first lockdown’s failure to eradicate and the greater failure of the medical authorities who imposed it, raising question about their leadership. Mask mandates avoided embarrassing questions.

Now, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health has pulled the plug on the farce of mandating worthless masks.  Nevertheless, without science and contrary to previously believed medical advice, the Arts Majors, drop-outs, and otherwise crazy Karens on the public board are virtue signalling on the backs of students, and making their ignorant selves feel better by postponing the dropping of a mask mandate until the arbitrary date of April 15.  Note, this is a date picked out of the air; it’s not based on conditions.

The answer to arbitrary and illegal exercise of power by authorities is to rebel against it – en mass.

Conservatives believe in small government modestly administered, to keep would-be Putins in check.  Having the physical power to do something doesn’t make it legal to exercise that power any time and in any way one chooses.

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Start taking names

Vincent J. Curtis

10 Mar 22

RE: ‘Callous, thoughtless’ end to pandemic: Province to end restrictions , but masks still urged by health and science leaders. By Joanna Frketich.  The Hamilton Spectator 10 Mar 22.

It’s time for the College of Physicians and Surgeons to start taking notice and start taking names.  Perhaps it’s time for cancel culture to visit upon those who made the pandemic worse.

For example, Dr. Manaka Pai, a member of Premier Ford’s laughably named “science table” says that it’s ‘callous, thoughtless’ end of the pandemic to drop mask mandates in schools.  Perhaps Dr. Pai can explain how a mask that doesn’t seal to the face can seal out viruses, or seal the in.  Never mind whether the filtration material can actually filter out particles as small as a coronavirus.  After that, he can explain why students need to be masked at all.  People under 19 are more at risk from the seasonal flu than they are from COVID-19.  That’s the data, or does data not matter when it comes to compliance and control?  And after that, maybe he can explain why mask mandates are disappearing all over the United States, including the crazy-blue states like California?  Are their medical professionals that callous also? (And after that maybe he can explain how “15 days to flatten the curve” i.e. save the health care system from being overwhelmed morphed into permanent lockdown with the expectation of eradicating the virus?)

The fact is that masks never worked, unless they were N95s or NIOSH-approved respirators.  (See my “The futility of masking” 2 Aug 2020 of this blog)  Masks mandates began as the reason, (the trickery, the handwaving excuse really) for getting out of the first lockdown (Mid-March to August, 2020, remember?).  Masks were useful like thumb sucking, for psychological comfort, nothing more.

The jig is up.  Incompetence is now being exposed.  Holding to mask mandates now signals no good on the part of the physician recommending it for healthy people.

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On the analysis of wastewater for COVID

Vincent J. Curtis

9 Mar 22

RE: Straight poop on COVID surveillance.  Editorial the Hamilton Spectator

When I first read about the proposal to monitor wastewater for COVID virus loading, my experience in business and in analytical chemistry told me to be skeptical.  Straightaway, it was obvious that somebody had their hand out.  Grant money was required to develop the analytical technique, and then more money would have to be paid to get the analyses done once the technique was developed.  Nice business, if you can get it.

But even if you could measure accurately the viral load in wastewater, so what?  What can you usefully relate that measurement to?  There’s many a slip betwixt lip and cup.  It was argued that rising viral loads would forecast rising case numbers.  That very thing has been argued the last two weeks.  But what have we actually seen?

If rising viral load in wastewater is analytically (or quantitatively) related to incipient case rise, then the difference in time can’t be more than five to seven days, given the course of the infection.  But for the last two weeks, wastewater numbers in Ontario have been forecasting rising case numbers, which hasn’t occurred.  In fact, case numbers continue to drop.  The link between wastewater number and case number is too tenuous to be useful, it turns out, however plausible the dialectal argument in the proposal seemed.

The relationship between viral load in wastewater and future case number is too weak to be useful.  So, why spend the money?

If it costs him nothing, then the bureaucrat will continue piling up useless data points.  But try to take it out of his pay, and he’ll make damned sure any data he’s paying for himself is very helpful.

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Loosely educated: latest attack on Separate Schools

Vincent J. Curtis

8 Mar 22

RE: Funding faith based schools a non-starter.  Op-ed by Malcom Buchanan, a member of the One Public Education Now group, which is suing the Ontario government over funding of Separate Schools.

If ever there was a testimonial to how bad public education has become in Ontario, the article at reference was it.  To begin with, the funding of Separate Schools in Ontario has been going on since Confederation, so that hardly qualifies as a “non-starter.”  Deeper into the article, we find that the real bone of contention is the full funding of Grades 11 and 12 in Separate Schools.  He goes on to describe as absurd the idea that funding two separate systems as being no more expensive than funding One Government Monopoly System.  Notice the slippage from objecting to the funding of Grades 11 and 12 to objecting to an entire separate system, something guaranteed under Section 93 of the Constitution Act, 1867?

Malcolm Buchanan’s invocation of Section 15 of the Charter to invalidate Section 93 of the Constitution Act, 1867, amounts to saying that his equality before the law is violated because someone else is getting government money.  And never mind that included in Section 15 are exceptions for programs of amelioration.

The madcap effort of the One Public Education Now group is to attempt an American-style use of the Courts to achieve what they cannot at the ballot box.  But not even U.S. courts would attempt to invalidate one section of their constitution on the basis of another section.

Ontario needs a Separate School system if only to see how badly run the public system is.

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Chrystia Freeland's Kiev apartment

Vincent J. Curtis

4 Mar 22

RE: Editorial & news items.  The Hamilton Spectator 4 Mar 22 (Libs regain mojo)

What an odd confection of hubris and nemesis the March 4^th Spectator brings.  We see that a four tower project pitched for a site in Strathcona neighbourhood is being strongly opposed by the current residents of Strathcona.  I wonder how many of them voted against urban boundary expansion?  This project is but a sip, a foretaste of what’s coming if Hamilton is going to accommodate 200,000 more residents in the lower city.  After hubris comes nemesis.

Then there’s the story of the Catholic School Board flying the flag of surrender* in June.  It quotes a trustee saying that so many students were hurting, and this seemed like a logical way to show acceptance and support.  I can’t believe such thinking escaped from a Catholic system alive, so lacking in logic and rigor it is.  Left unsaid was what the students were hurting from, why this now, and how the flying of a flag would ‘show acceptance’ and permanently relieve their hurt.  Flying the flag of surrender isn’t going to change any minds, it’s only going to show the state of play on the Board.  Flying the Russian flag over Kiev is a close equivalent to flying the flag of “gay pride” (as if it’s something to be proud of!) over a Catholic school.  Doing so will buy you no peace.  And suppose some enterprising student hauled it down and burnt it?  How will that affect the sense of ‘acceptance’ if done to loud cheers?  Stupid beyond words.  What's next - the crescent moon of Islam?

Then there’s the editorial claiming the Liberals have regained their mojo, demonstrated in their robust response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  They certainly emptied the last stores of the CAF, and one wonders if they’ll be replenished.  To have mojo, you need cojones, and this is pansy Justin we’re talking about – the guy who hid from the big, bad truckers, like Tamara Lich.

Chrystia Freeland is probably scared witless of the Russians taking control of her luxury apartment in Kiev, and she’ll throw every little thing Canada has to protect it.  Even Andrew Coyne says that Canada has been behind everyone else in NATO in sanctioning Russia.  To say the Liberals have regained their mojo after the trucker’s protest and the invocation of the Emergencies Act is just what I’d expect to hear from a vassal of Torstar.

Keeping Lich and King in jail proves the Liberals have no mojo or cojones; they’re still scared, it’s only a question of whom.

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*The gay pride flag

 

 

Sun Tzu on Putin

Vincent J. Curtis

2 Mar 22

The famous Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu advised against devastating a province in the course of conquering it.  Sun Tzu said it was like an Emperor ruining a jewel he hoped to feature in his crown.  Yet Putin’s strategy in Ukraine seems intent on devastating the country as the means of conquering it.

The Russians are not attempting to assault the major Ukrainian cities of Kiev and Kharkov, and are instead attempting to reduce them slowly with long distance rocket, missile, and artillery fire.  Because of the intense resistance of the Ukrainian people, an attempt to conquer a major city street by street would devour the Russian army.  Hence, Russia’s strategy is to induce surrender by terror attacks and strangulation.

But Russia lacks the money to rebuild a major city.  What is Russia going to do with 20 million refugees, send them to the west?  Two of the purposes of taking Ukraine was to add her population and economy to those of Russia. But if the Ukrainian economy is ruined, half her population displaced, her agriculture in disarray, what does Putin gain except lots more empty space, the heavy cost of supporting a ruined country, and the heavier costs imposed on Russia by the enmity of the rest of the world?

That Putin threatened nuclear retaliation against NATO countries shows how desperate he’s getting.  His dream of a speedy conquest is gone, and the cost of victory is looking exorbitant.  Negotiating a peace that looks a lot like status quo ante bellum would be a huge embarrassment back home.  Losing the war would ruin his place as a strong czar in the mould of Peter the Great in Russian history.

If Ukrainian resistance continues strong, we can expect increasing desperation from Putin.

Putin is failing two of the great rules of Sun Tzu: “Know thine enemy,” and “Know thyself.”  You can be certain that the Chinese – very serious students of Sun Tzu - are watching this war closely.

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More crap journalism from Toronto Star

Vincent J. Curtis

2 Mar 22

Re:  “Judge rules couples kids should not be vaccinated, cites anti-vax sources.”  By Betsy Powell of the Toronto Star, published in  The Hamilton Spectator 2 Mar 22

It used to be at major news organizations that writers of news articles would get their fingers rapped for inserting editorializing words into the piece.  I guess that means that Toronto Star is less of a big city daily than the Tilsonburg Weekly Times!

Betsy Powell of the Toronto Star needlessly inserted the word ‘discredited’ to describe several sources from “the internet.”  Who ‘discredited’ the sources – Bill Maher, some CNN talking head?  I get the Spectator through the internet, does that fact alone discredit it?  So, Powell, on her own, without citation, says the sources are ‘discredited.’  So, whom should we believe – her or the judge?

She then goes on to write, ‘whom the judge describes as “the inventor of the mRNA vaccine.”’  In fact, Dr. Robert W. Malone’s name is on the patent for the mRNA technology, so he is not someone to be casually dismissed by other alleged experts whom Powell (or her editor) happens to like.  She goes on to say that Malone “among other things claims the COVID-19 vaccine is ineffective” which claim has been “widely denounced by medical experts,” experts who go unnamed.  Malone’s additional crimes are his appearing on Fox News and a Joe Rogan podcast.

Saying that “the vaccine” is ineffective is a respectable thing to say from an expert’s point of view, because as a vaccine, it is a failure.  The best claim for them now is that they reduce the severity of an infection, but do not prevent infection or its spread.  They did not induce herd immunity even at 90 percent vaccination rates.

Powell’s was crap reporting.  Where was the editor?  And who slugged the story, “cites anti-vaxx sources?”  Malone isn’t anti-vaxx, he is just abundantly aware of the weaknesses of the COVID-19 ones.  Or is that distinction beyond the mental capacities of writer and editor?

Nevemind the Ontario COVID data which shows, based on hospitalizations and death, that a case can’t be made for vaccinating the healthy under 40; nay, under 60!  The science is that people under 40 – never mind kids under 18 – are at greater risk from the seasonal flu than they are from COVID-19.

Crap reporting.  Crap editing.  Crap journalism.  And Paul Berton writes constantly of why people are cancelling subscriptions!

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