Critical Race Theory: Too good for us

Vincent J. Curtis

29 Apr 22

RE: Why some are more equal than others.  Op-ed by Andrew Hunter, a “A Hamilton born free-lance author, artist, curator, and educator. The Hamilton Spectator 29 Apr 22.

When it comes to modern education, ignorance is bliss.  And few are more highly educated in Critical Race Theory than Andrew Hunter.  In his diatribe against white people, Hunter calls attention to Ahona Medhi being discriminated against by Carole Paikin Miller because Medhi is a coloured person, or ‘person of colour’ if you prefer the French style, and Miller is white.

Except that Miller is Semitic and Medhi is Egyptian, neither being classic Swedish, Irish, Scottish white.  Mediterranean is the most apt description of the looks of both.  What makes Semitic white and Egyptian coloured, Andrew Hunter doesn’t say, perhaps because addressing that issue would blow a gaping hole in his thesis.  And like every ideologue, if the facts don’t fit the theory, ignore the facts.

(On the off-chance that Medhi claims to be Iranian, well, Iranian is consider Aryan, which is regarded as the parent race of many European races; so there’s no escaping the point that Medhi isn’t the coloured person that Hunter makes her out to be.)

Regardless, the poison in CRT should be evident to all.  Constructing the world on the basis of hate, in this case hatred of whiteness, can never account for the facts.  Hunter talks about “white privilege” but never explains what it is and why not ever white enjoys it.  Nor does he explain why it exists only in parts of the world.  It doesn’t exist, for example, in the Congo, Communist China, North Korea, or India.  Between Russia and the Ukraine, one would be hard-pressed to find white privilege.

He also fails to explain why white women don’t seem to enjoy white privilege in the presence of men.  So between men and women, and among Russians, Ukrainians, Polish, German, French, English, Irish, and Swedish, there must be gradations of privilege, white Hunter fails to explain, explore, or even acknowledge.  Reading his litany of complaints, I get the impression I’m listening to a dyspeptic, post-modernist Marxist adapt his theory of proletariat being oppressed by the bourgeoisie to the 21^st century.

He incorrectly states that Queen Victoria and United Empire Loyalists are symbols of a society founded on chattel slavery and indigenous genocide.  British society never had chattel slavery, and the British Empire abolished slavery and suppressed the slave trade before Victoria became queen.  The UE’s were Americans escaping the newly created country after the American Revolution.  Upper Canada abolished slavery in 1793.  They were escaping the country that had chattel slavery.  As for aboriginal genocide, well they’re still around and there are no accounts of mass slaughter of Indians by Canadian colonists.  The falsehoods and calumnies here are coming so thick and fast that keep up the thread is hard.  Once again, when you’re an ideologue pushing your theory, facts don’t matter.

Anyhow, being a progressive, Hunter thinks he holds the monopoly on intelligence and morality.  Otherwise, it’s hard to fathom how he can tolerate his own existence, being a white man and all.

I’ve said enough to destroy Hunter’s entire thesis.  His ideology of CRT is poisonous and self-contradictory.  His facts are totally false calumnies, and he fails to confront inconvenient facts.

I don’t know about Hunter, but my masculinity is off the charts toxic.

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Spec now doxing people?

Vincent J. Curtis

28 Apr 22

RE: Rebel flag at rural home called ‘disturbing’ By Sebastian Bron.  The Hamilton Spectator 28 Apr 22.

RE: Don’t let Canada’s flag be co-opted by angry minority.  Op-ed by Don Sawyer.

What’s disturbing about the page 1 story is that the Red Guards at the People’s Daily are now into doxing people.  Every yahoo in Hamilton was invited to travel to Guyatt Road in Binbrook to harass the owners of the private home, who have already been visited once by the police, by CBC News, and by the Spectator.  This manufactured news story began when Ami Archibald-Varley, a Jamaican immigrant and podcaster who lives near the house, began complaining to the media, police, and everyone else.  “Seeing it makes me angry,” she said of the flag, “and I’m not the only racialized person in the community who feels this way.”  (The busy-body trouble-maker didn't explain how she and her friends became 'racialized.'  But that's a racism story for another day.)

To those who fly it today, that flag represents rebelliousness against authority, without apologies for the profanity used in the emphatic expression of that opinion.  You often see it flown in the United States.  That flag was, in fact, the naval jack of the Confederacy, not a “battle flag” or even one of its national flags.  Historian Shelby Foote has a short video on YouTube on that flag and what it represented to those who created it.

The crass ignorance in the story is incredible.  In the first place, why are all these Jamaicans upset, except through their own ignorance of the matters at issue?  The American Civil War did not affect them.  I’ll bet not one of them can tell you anything of note about the war, or the issues at stake; and slavery wasn’t the primary issue.

The bloated ignorance in the story is incredible, but ignorance is bliss in today’s education.  Collectivize everything, especially thought and opinion.  Destroy a few of those who step out of line, and the rest will be intimidated into compliance!

You can’t even fly the Canadian flag anymore if you hold the wrong opinions, according to the op-ed “Don’t let the Canadian flag be co-opted by angry minority” by Don Sawyer,  (He writes of his being in the anti-War movement of the 1960s, and the he emigrated to Canada in 1970.)  By angry minority, he refers to the Truckers and their sympathizers.

No wonder some rebel!

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UPDATE: Harassment and threats of violence win!

The harassment campaign worked.  On Saturday, the Spectator named the home owner, who was then “contacted” by “anti-racism advocates, faith leaders, Mayor Fred Eisenberger again, and the Spectator admitted it had failed to reach the owner, Robert Pelton, after repeated attempts.  In addition, “about 30 people rallied in Binbrook.” Probably more people than Mr. Pelton had magazine capacity for if they attacked his property.  By Sunday, May 1, the flag was down and everybody was celebrating.

Mr. Pelton was harassed into surrender by the essential assistance of the Spectator and by threats of violence.

Gaslight Wednesday

Vincent J. Curtis

27 Apr 22

RE: Debt sale may make inflation worse.  Op-ed by Dr. Yannik Beaudoin, seinor economist and director of innovation at the David Sukuki Foundation; and Mark Anielski, an economist and author of “The Economics of well-being”  The Hamilton Spectator 27 Apr 22.

RE: “We’re failing the test on vaccination” Spec editorial.  This editorial follows on the new item critiqued yesterday "Heaping hatred on the unvaxxed."

It must be gaslight Wednesday at the People’s Daily.  We get a pair of economists insisting that inflation isn’t ‘too much money chasing too few goods,’ and the editorial demands Kim Jong Un like election percentages for the three shot vaccine regimen, on the grounds that its better than young men get pericarditis than that the elderly die from one too many co-morbidities.

Some things are so stupid that only intellectuals can believe it.  The Spec editors must think themselves intellectuals when they run an op-ed by economists who say that inflation isn’t too much money chasing too few goods.  When the Bank of Canada sells government debt; the transaction takes cash out of circulation, cash that could be used to buy goods and services instead.  Less cash, less inflation; that’s why the Bank does it.  The selling of war bonds in WWII tended to dampen inflation.  The war economy had full employment, good wages, but little to spend the cash on.  Manufacturing was turned over to war work.  War bonds took cash out of circulation.  The Spec op-ed gives us Marxian nonsense instead, all for the purpose of sowing confusion and anger.

The collectivism continues with the editorial lamenting that not enough young people are sacrificing themselves for the good of the old and infirm.  The vaccines are worthless for the young because (a) they don’t get sick enough from the virus to require hospitalization, and (b) the vaccines are nearly useless against the Omicron and BA.2 variants anyway. For the good of the collective, young men have to risk pericarditis!  People who are older than average life expectancy are at risk of dying from one too many co-morbidities, and it’s the insufficiently vaccinated who are to blame if they die!

When the good of the collective takes precedence over the good of the individual, it’s time for that individual to find a different collective.

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Heaping hatred on the unvaxxed

Vincent J. Curtis

26 Ape 22

RE: COVID-19 signals in wastewater reach an all-time high.  By Joanna Frekitch.  The Hamilton Spectator 26 Apr 22.

(We’re going to ignore the ridiculous claim that the wastewater virus count is at an “all-time high!”  The analysis hasn’t been done for a year yet, so what’s all time is meaningless sensationalism.  In addition, there is no useful correlation between virus in wastewater and pressure on the health care system.)

This article is nothing but an attempt to heap hatred and contempt upon the unvaccinated.  That it uses an article in a medical journal shows the degree to which Marxism has reached into STEM.

The pandemic waves are not of the unvaccinated.  On Monday, April 25, the Ontario COVID page reported that of 1368 hospitalizations with COVID, 83 percent were vaccinated, and 17 percent unvaccinated.  Of 119 in ICU with COVID, 77 percent were vaccinated, 23 percent unvaccinated.  Ontario is 91 percent vaccinated, and the COVID numbers are almost in the same proportion of vaccinated to unvaccinated.  This means that against Omicron and the BA.2 variant, the vaccines are practically worthless.

The point of the CMAJ article was to claim that the unvaccinated posed a risk to the health and safety of the vaccinated.  A vaccine is intended to protect you from catching the disease, and that includes catching it from other people.  But if the vaxxed are, or remain, at risk of catching the disease from the unvaxxed, then the vaccine is effectively worthless, and perhaps the smarter play was to remain unvaxxed!

Then comes the full bore Marxism that reverses 2500 years of medical philosophy.  Medicine is now no longer about the patient, but about the good of society. Never mind your good, “…such arguments neglect the potential harms to a wider community.,,”

What is the good to society if young men get heart conditions from the vaccine?

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The Communists are the real experts on social murder

Vincent J. Curtis

25 Apr 22

RE: Social murder is still a reality.  Op-ed by Dennis Raphael, professor of health policy at York University.  Published 25 apr 22 in The Hamilton Spectator.

When it comes to murder, social or otherwise, the communists are the real experts.  Over 100 million people were killed by communists seeking either to enforce their rule or during social and economic experiments like the “Great Leap Forward.”

Professor Dennis Raphael thinks it social murder to end mask mandates.  But where did the idea of masking originate from?  Why, Communist China, which even now is engaged is actual social murder in Shanghai.  Where did the virus originate from?  Why, bioweapons research conducted in the WIV in Communist China with money provided through a surrogate by the U.S. National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) a U.S. government bureaucracy!

The problem with mask mandates is that the type of mask isn’t specified.  A mask that doesn’t seal to the face can’t seal viruses in or out; never mind whether the filter can actually block particles as small as a virus.  There never was any science behind masking, but good communists know about social control and mandated masks as a sign of obedience to authority.  Mask mandates existed through five waves of the pandemic and didn’t stop or modify a single wave.

It’s a bit rich for a communist to try to smear a “right-wing” conservative government with murder, though it’s not unexpected.  It is characteristic of the Left to accuse you of what they’re doing themselves.

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The narcissism of climate change

 The warmest on record

Vincent J. Curtis

24 Apr 22

RE: Europe saw warmest summer on record.  AP story published in the Spec on 23 apr 22.

This AP story was published because it feeds into the climate change narrative.  The catch in the report lies in the expression, “on record.”  If your record set is short enough, there can be lots of things that are the highest, “on record.”  In this case, the record goes back thirty years, less than the average temperature cycles observed in the 20^th century.

The geographical Europe we know emerged from the last ice age, 10,000 years ago.  Within the last millennium and a half, historical records claim that the Seine and the Rhine Rivers ran dry during summers that were exceptionally hot and dry.  (Tony Heller of Real Climate Science mentions this is in a couple of his videos)  If something like that happened today, the climate crazies would have paroxysms, of either pain or joy I’m not sure which.

In the grand scheme of things, last summer was nothing special for Europe, and the world is larger than Europe.  What was interesting about the story was the observation that when summers get hot, the wind tends not to blow, striking a blow at the nostrum that wind and solar are the future of power generation.  Wind and solar simply aren’t there when you need it most.

That mankind is destroying the earth’s atmosphere is an expression of narcissism, as well as of Marxist nihilism.  The lesion here isn’t that that the earth is warming due to man, but that the environmentalists are wrong on both counts.

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Ontario's risible science table

Vincent J. Curti

19 Apr 22

RE: City eyes scrapping the shot requirement.  By Sebastian Bron, The Hamilton Spectator 19 Apr 22.

Hamilton city administration is finding its way towards good sense by scrapping the vaccine requirement for city staff.  They’re showing better sense than the risibly named Ontario “Science Table.”

The head of the table, Dr. Peter Juni, claimed at the beginning of April that Ontario was getting 100,000 to 120,000 Omicron infections per day, based on wastewater analysis, not the 2,000 per day then usually reported on the Ontario COVID website.  Juni also estimated that over 6 million Ontarians had been infected with Omicron since December.  The current wave has peaked, Juni said, based on the falling wastewater numbers.

What can a rational person conclude from what Juni said?  One could rationally conclude that the vaccine qua vaccine was a failure.  Omicron raced through the vaccine like it wasn’t there.  Vaccination didn’t stop most people from getting infected., based on Juni’s estimate.  The much hailed “booster” shot stopped nothing.  The lockdown and mask mandates utterly failed to stop the spread.  The actual danger of COVID was vastly overestimated.

Yet, Juni, irrationally, recommends that people continue to wear a mask! What??

Mask mandates are being scrapped everywhere in the U.S. because people recognize that they’re useless, harmful, were imposed without proper legal authority, and never had scientific justification in the first place.

Ontario has reached the point of exhaustion also.  “Wolf!” has been cried too often.  We have to get back to normal, and the city’s scrapping the shot requirement is a step in that direction.

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Children flocking unnecessarily

Vincent J. Curtis

18 Apr 22

RE: Youth with COVID flock to ER at McMaster Children’s: Nearly 8 kids a day! By Joanna Frketich, The Hamilton Spectator Page 1 headline article 18 Apr 22.

We’ve known since March, 2020, that COVID is dangerous almost exclusively to those over 80.  Unsurprisingly, the average age of death in the first year of the pandemic was over 80.  Yes, there were exceptions for those with certain co-morbidities such as obesity and diabetes, but the Ontario COVID statistics show that COVID morbidity falls practically to zero for those under 65.

That hasn’t stopped the panic porn.  Every day through every major media outlet, including the Spectator, COVID fearmongering fails to differentiate by age.  Everyone, it seems from listening to the MSM, is at risk from death by COVID, when this isn’t the case at all.

Hence, it’s not surprising that concerned parents take their kids to hospital at the slightest sign of COVID.  And kids must be at risk, right?  They have to wear those obedience masks in school, right?  Doesn’t this mean that COVID is dangerous to children?  Actually, no!  Enforced mask-wearing is a sign of something else, not of risk to those under 19.

It’s down in paragraph three that it’s confessed, “…the surge has not resulted in more kids being admitted to the hospital for COVID.”  In the midst of the Omicron wave more kids weren’t admitted to hospital, but the headline reads, “Youth with COVID flock to ER” The word “unnecessarily” wasn’t used because it would cancel the panic porn slant.

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Best Defence Conference 2021 Report

Vincent J. Curtis

18 Nov 21

The city of Las Vegas, Nevada, is an extremely popular destination for conventions.  The city offers many and unique diversions from the drudgery of actually sitting through hour after hour of power point presentation in which the speaker reads off the slides as a substitute for prepared remarks.  If a conventioneer needs a stiff drink for fortification at ten in the morning, well, it’s five o’clock somewhere.  And what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

With the disastrous loss of The Beef Baron, London cannot even pretend to be Sin City, Ontario.  London was the ostensible location of the 2021 edition of the Best Defence Conference, of which Esprit de Corps is a sponsor.  I say ostensible because the conference was held virtually, which meant everyone had to pretend to be in London and meet the timings of London, even those of us who live in the Las Vegas time zone.

At least a live conference has the benefit of other living beings nearby with whom one can commiserate, and perhaps flirt with; but a virtual conference has the disadvantages of sitting through hours of drudgery but without diversion or relief.  The organizers promise that next year will be live.  And perhaps London will regain a semblance of night life.

Conferences like Best Defense do serve a purpose besides getting people out of the office for a couple of days.  The conference obliges DND/CAF to make presentations to an audience of civilian taxpayers who understand most of what is being said.  A DND/CAF supplier has to know what’s going on, what the thinking is, and what the future may hold in order to adapt and prepare to meet the needs of DND/CAF, or the lack of need, as the case may be.  It is a friendly confrontation to be sure.  And defence folks get to see each other and evaluate who’s who in the zoo.

The conference covered two full days.  The first opened with the Directors of Requirements of the three services each giving presentations on the various programs for which they were responsible.  I can attest that no program in DND contains the letters ‘Z’ or ‘X’ in its acronym.  Don’t ask me how I know.  The CAF is a death-dealing organization, and by the time you reach senior officer rank you develop some pretty exquisite ways of inflicting it.  Power point, for example.  Busy slides full of artwork portending meaning but really having none, accompanied by words in small type, or columns of acronyms all passing in succession, accompanied by a dull intonation of a voice reading bits of them here and there.  Death is almost painless, and welcome.

One thing did shock me, and that was the opening slide of the presentation of the Director of Naval Requirements.  It looks like a DND recruiting poster, and features a saucy-looking A/SLt posing like she had just jumped out of a cake and with ‘come-hither- written all over her.  Behind her were two muscular and handsome sailors with grins on their faces.  If we’re going to take this sexual misconduct business seriously, that poster has to go.  Women have to be depicted with all their blouse buttons done up and taciturn looks on their faces.  You can’t propose libertinage, and then when it happens, punish it like a Puritan.

The most dynamic of the three service presenters went by the handle “Super Dave,” which, I’m sure, was bestowed in admiration of his ability to drop lots of heavy ordinance from a great height in either official language.  He merely read the initials of the various programs he was talking about and couldn’t be bothered to actually pronounce the full name of the program – if it actually had one - perhaps for fear of embarrassment of their triviality.

Strangely, while the navy guy mentioned programs concerning submarines, the requirement for new surface combatant vessels didn’t seem to appear on any slide.  The Air Force guy seemed to have hinted at fighter jet replacement on a slide, but my question about the number of Aussie F-18s that have been refurbished and put into RCAF service went unanswered.  The army guy flat out showed his empty pockets, admitting that the army has no plans for any new major acquisitions in the foreseeable future. He’s limited to $5 million buy-and-try per program.

The characteristic of a DND/CAF acquisition program is that it be non-lethal.  Oh, the army did talk about recovery vehicles and logistical vehicles and that sort of thing, but nothing that directly increases the lethality of any service was prominently mentioned.  Certainly, nothing was featured that caught my attention.  This aspect of the presentations demonstrated well the political atmosphere in Ottawa as it affects the military, and how closely attuned the top brass is to that attitude.  Military spending is good if it creates jobs for the right people, but let’s not talk about what a military is actually for.  The military is good if it can make the government look good, as in helping out during COVID and the B.C flooding.

Consistent with that was the presentation by BGen P.C. Sabourin, Director General Information Capabilities Force Development, which well demonstrated the peculiar thinking of DND in Ottawa.  Sabourin’s presentation was without slides, and his words sketched a world of abstractions, abstractions piled upon abstractions, and the inner workings of abstractions with each other.  Plus the accompanying ethics.  When you live in a world of abstractions, the happenings in the world of the concrete don’t affect you.  Transformation was the buzzword.  Everything was about transformation and how essential it was.  Transformation was itself the goal.

Philosophically, this is nonsense.  You have end-state A and end-state B and transformation is the process by which the thing in question changes from A into B.  The goal is end-state B, and the value of the transformation is found in the value of B relative to A.  But why transform from A to B at all?  To remain relevant is the answer.  So, why not just say what B is?  The question “whose army are you planning to attack?” kept cropping up in my mind, but “to remain relevant” gives the game away.  It’s about remaining relevant in the politics of Ottawa, and “transformation” is an incantation that keeps everything in suspense until what is relevant in the politics of Ottawa becomes clearer.

Continuing with the theme of inoffensive non-lethality. Sabourin talked about the centrality of data, as if data were the uber alles of the modern battlefield, as if enemy soldiers were killed by bytes instead of bullets, as if that view’s refutation in Afghanistan hadn’t happened; shooters and their morale don’t even enter the picture.

Best Defence is a conference of real value because it forces DND/CAF to speak to knowledgeable audiences about serious business – because serious money is involved.  The DND presenters may reveal as much by what they don’t say as by what they say and by how they say it.

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Evidence based medicine: Falsifying a medical ideology

Vincent J. Curtis

13 Apr 22

RE: A better understanding of evidence based medicine.  Op-ed by Mark Levine, C.M., MD, professor in the department of oncology at McMaster University, and a retired medical oncologist.  The Hamilton Spectator 11 Apr 22.

Dr. Mark Levine congratulated himself for his creating of a medical ideology called “evidence based medicine.”  He explained that ‘EBM’ refers to using the best evidence available in making decisions about the care of individual patients.  He contrasted this to the old practice of medical decision making being based on a physician’s opinion and experience.  Why these two things aren’t the same went unexplained.  One hopes that a physician’s opinion is based upon the best evidence available and his experience.

Erecting EBM into an ideology raises three problems.  First, who gets to decide what the best evidence is? Second, what happens if the best evidence turns out to be politically inspired non-sense? Third, how do you handle challenges to the decision of what the best available is?

We saw in the political response to the pandemic all three of these worst cases come to pass.  The uselessness, harmfulness, and sheer irrationality of a societal lockdown was documented and published by Dr. Scott Atlas, MD, in April, 2020, but this was ignored.  There never was any science behind mask mandates, and yet it is still the go-to recommendation of many of influence, as it is even now ridiculed.  But the political power of the doctors overrides and ignores the best evidence.  They certain don’t confront opposition based on science and rationality because they don’t have to.

The vaccine mandate proved less than the best medicine for most people under sixty, and a failure as a vaccine.  What’s best for the patient got ignored in the cry for responsibility for others.  Even now, a fourth booster shot is officially recommended; never mind the vaccine was developed for the alpha variant and we’re now into the BA2 variant.  Therapeutics were ignored because the vaccine was supposed to be the solution.

Challenges to the official responses were viciously suppressed, and not just on social media.  In fact, support for the official narrative was viciously supported by those whose funding came from those controlling the official narrative.

Ideologies never work because their first principle doesn’t always hold.

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Comfortable ignorance

Vincent J. Curtis

12 Apr 22

RE: Minimum wage debate is finally over.  Spectator editorial 12 Apr 22.

It says something about the comfort one enjoys in one’s ignorance when they write that an “enduring shibboleth” among a “certain set” is that minimum wage laws are “pernicious to the public good.”  Include economist Thomas Sowell among that “set.”

Sowell has written about his experience with minimum wage laws as an economist in many of his books written over the last twenty years.  Sowell was a Marxist in the 1950s, but when he did an internship with the U.S. Department of Labor and did a study of the effect of minimum wage laws, he became a convinced believer in the free-market.

Minimum wage laws effectively priced those just entering the workforce without skills out of a job.  This was especially true among minorities because a minimum wage created a large pool of unemployed, unskilled labor which made it a buyers’ market that was disadvantageous to minorities.  The Labor Department looked upon minimum wage as a bureaucratic imperative because its administration is what gave the bureaucrats work! To hell with the effect on minorities!

The perniciousness of minimum wage laws has been well documented and explained by Thomas Sowell; it’s not some “shibboleth.”

But it says something about the comfortable ignorance of Marxists and “scientific socialists” that they can’t adapt their thinking to the evidence.  Sowell was an empiricist before he was a Marxist, and when he saw the failure of Marxism, he changed his thinking to explain the evidence.  He didn’t ignore the evidence because it didn’t fit the theory.

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Trudeau: "you're too well off. I'll fix that!"

Vincent J. Curtis

9 Apr 22

Prime Minister Trudeau came to Hamilton to “sell” his budget.  Why he would need to do that is a mystery, but never mind.  He told people, “Your most valuable asset is way overvalued, and I’ve come to fix that.”  Why he wasn’t stoned proves that no one in his audience understood what he was saying.

Prime Minister Trudeau is an out of touch trust fund baby who lives at taxpayers’ expense in a cottage on the grounds of Rideau Hall.  He has never had any idea of middle class existence.  Nevertheless, he came to Hamilton to say that he’s going to reduce that million dollar bungalow you own to a quarter mill, its proper selling price, in his non-market opinion.  Never mind that three years ago you paid half a mill for that pile!

Luckily for Mountaineers, Trudeau only has $10 billion to play with.  This means that he can reduce the effective price of a $500,000 home to $400,000 one hundred thousand times.  Since Canada is admitting over 200,000 immigrants a year, that spending program will cover immigration demand for a year.

Included in the devaluation of property values scheme is the prohibition of purchases by foreign buyers.  It so happens that most of these foreign buyers are Chinese.  But being a man of the left, no one is going to call Prime Minister Blackface a racist on account of official, that is to say systemic, racism.

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Bay du Nord: Climate what?

Vincent J. Curtis

8 Apr 22

RE: Bay du Nord a Liberal balancing act.  Spectator editorial 8 Apr 22

The editorial, in its apologia for Justin Trudeau’s volte-face on oil and gas emissions, failed to address a salient point, namely the difference between Alberta and Newfoundland.  The difference is that one votes almost monolithically conservative while the other monolithically Liberal.  Guess which one gets the shaft?

Newfoundland’s economic survival depends on Federal government largesse, and Bay du Nord is going to provide well-paying jobs and a stream of new revenue to both provincial and federal governments.  Conservative Alberta has to carry the burden of emissions reduction, even if it cripples Alberta’s economy.  Alberta was also two to three weeks behind Ontario in receiving the new vaccines as they were coming out.  Notice a pattern?

The federal budget deficit was not as disastrous as it could have been because oil is selling at around $100 a barrel.  The deficit would be a yawning chasm if oil were selling at last year’s prices.  To appear as good financial managers, the Liberal government has to maintain a profitable oil and gas sector, their protestations about climate change notwithstanding.  But Alberta can be pained by requiring emissions reductions, while those who vote Liberal get rewarded.

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A better COVID metric

Vincent J. Curtis

7 Apr 22

RE: Hospital staff off work for COVID rising.  Joanna Frketich, The Hamilton Spectator 7 Apr 22.

RE: Fourth COVID shot questions answered.  Joanna Freketich, The Hamilton Spectator 7 Apr 22.

Never mind the viral loading in wastewater, the best tell of the rising prevalence of COVID is the number of hospital staff booking off sick!

It’s funny, but hospital staff are subject to mandatory vaccination and have access to the best masks and protective clothing, but they’re still booking off sick - just when they’re needed most.  Far be it from me to suggest motives, but it came to be that our sympathies for “front-line” workers means they aren’t manning the front line when the attack is on, and the news is all about the pressure the few left working are under.

Anyhow, the efficacy of the booster and the fourth dose is being cast in doubt by this new metric of prevalence, i.e. hospital staff booked off sick..  Masks and vaccines aren’t working for hospital staff.  A fourth dose is running into the law of diminishing returns.  The “science table” claims five million Ontarians have had COVID, and the rates are 100,000 a day actually, which destroys the case for masks vaccines, lockdowns, and any other protective measures.  Yet the therapeutics are still hard to come by because they weren’t favored by the American authorities.

Any doctor huffing and puffing about masking now is talking through his hat.  Calls for fourth booster needs a shot of reality.

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A sexualized culture: barking up the wrong tree

Vincent J. Curtis

31 Dec 21

Madame Marie Deschamps observed that the Canadian Armed Forces suffered from a ‘sexualized’ culture.  She maintained that this sexualized culture was the cause of the prevalence of sexual misconduct in the CAF.  Hence, if the sexualized culture were eliminated, so would the prevalence of sexual misconduct.

The astonishing number of sexual misconduct allegations against flag officers, starting days after his retirement in February 2021 of CDS General Jonathan Vance, his immediate successor, Adm Art MacDonald, then VAdm Haydn Edmondson, and MGen Dany Fortin, added political urgency to dealing with sexual misconduct, which in turn implied the ‘sexualized’ culture’ of the CAF.  Another retired Supreme Court Justice, Louise Arbour, was appointed to come up with a solution.  A five year plan is now in train to eliminate sexual misconduct in the CAF.

If asked, I would say that the Canadian Army had a ‘military’ culture.  A military culture is a kind of culture, but the term ‘sexualized’ grammatically means the end-state of a process.  The sexualization of the army’s military culture into its current sexualized state must have begun sometime, sensibly with the admission of women.  The Canadian Army recognizes that men and women are different, and are not indifferent to each other; and the sexual differences in the membership are manifested in the army in numerous ways.

For example, the existence, in garrison, of male and female lines, each with their own ablution facilities.  Morning PT does not emphasize upper body strength, with push-ups and chin-ups.  The fitness requirements for men and women are completely different.  The No. 1, 2, and 3 Orders of Dress each distinguish differences between the sexes.  Rank names in French are now feminized.  The achievements of women are celebrated in ways not done for men who achieved something similar, as if the achievement by a woman were something remarkable.

These are but a few examples of the sexualized state of CAF culture.

Obviously, serious critical thinking needs to be done to separate the bad from the good in the sexualized culture of the CAF if the prevalence of sexual misconduct is to be tackled intelligently. Because not all the aspects of the sexualized culture of the CAF are considered bad, we can see that Madame Deschamps was incoherent to condemn the sexualized culture of the CAF - some of it is good and necessary.

Compared to what?  We have no way of gauging how bad or how good the prevalence of sexual misconduct is in the CAF.  One measure could be by comparison to Canadian society as a whole, but that is impossible because what constitutes sexual misconduct in the CAF is not considered such in Canadian society at large.  For example, off-colour jokes, pin-up calendars in the workplace, and even consensual affairs between workplace superiors and subordinates are not civil offenses.

LGen Jennie Carignan predicts without evidence that changing the military culture to eliminate sexual misconduct will take five years.  Five years will take her to CRA, meaning she pays no price for being wrong.  We know that the techniques available to the CAF to eliminate sexual misconduct boil down to education, training, and administrative action.

An intellectual will tell you they have the solution, but a rational economist will tell you there are no solutions, only trade-offs.  Questions that will never be asked of the five year program or its aim are “what are the trade-offs?” and “at what cost?”

If, to eliminate sexual misconduct, the trade-off is getting rid of all the straight white men from the CAF and going with an all-gay, female, and BIPOC force, what will be the cost to the combat capability of the CAF?

The cause of sexual misconduct isn’t culture, the cause is “animal appetite” of the individual, as called in philosophy.  Animal appetite is resistant to knowledge and sometimes to reason.  Knowledge of the law does not prevent crime. ‘Hearts and minds,’ ‘shaping and exploiting’ didn’t work in Afghanistan.  What will be the cost of being wrong again?

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Is Canada in Cultural Revolution?

Vincent J. Curtis

6 Apr 22

RE: Time to harness the cultural sector  OP-ed by Anthony Garousfalis-Auger, who is an organize with the Climate Emergency Unit.  He is a founder and co-ordinating circle member of the sectoral climate arts leadership for the emergency.

RE: Ontario plans to offer fourth dose.  By Holly McKenzie-Sutter.  The Canadian Press

RE: Quebec, P.E.I. extend mask mandates until late April.  By Colette Derworiz.  The Canadian Press.

When Canada’s Minister for Heritage plans to harness the cultural sector to aid the government in its fight against climate change, you have to wonder if Canada is in the grip of a cultural revolution like that which tortured China from 1966 to 1976.  In communist countries, the open-minded pursuit of truth is often a punishable offence but, in China, open adhesion to the party line of the moment was demanded of everyone.  The cultural sector was used openly to propagandize the party line unashamedly.  Since the party was right, the rightness of the message was not open for discussion, and it was essential that the people be propagandized in the party truth lest disastrous deviationism occur.

The employment of the cultural sector to propagandize the party line is a sign of weakness.  Truth provides its own defense.  The propaganda on climate change has been relentless, and the open-minded discussion of the matter is rigorously suppressed.  Why the fear of retrogression?  Why so much pressure on the populace to conform?

We see the same thing with masks.  Mask mandates are now openly mocked in the U.S., and Anthony Fauci’s many noble lies and theatre on the matter are now widely mentioned.  On Canadian media, the usefulness of mask mandates and the efficacy of a fourth dose are forbidden topics of discussion.  Why?

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 The Garousfalis-Auger character looks like he’s straight out of the Saul D. Alinsky school.  Why would creative arts need coordination with the party line?  Sectoral climate arts leadership for the emergency?  What?  How is this different from thought control?  This is how the Left works folks – they’re organized and enforce party discipline rigorously and mercilessly.  You can be certain that any deviationism will be met with enforced cancellation.

Why God can never forget you

Commentary on Isaiah 49:15

Vincent J. Curtis

2 Apr 22

The first reading for Wednesday, March 30, 2022, was from Isaiah, and included the following passage:

Isaiah 49:15

"Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you." (ESV)

Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas both hold that God is the efficient cause of the existence of the universe.  An efficient cause is the agent which creates the thing or does the deed.  Certainly in Aquinas, the creation of the universe is a continuous act, that God in in the act of continuously creating the universe.  If God ceased creating the universe it would cease to exist, instantly.

Hence, if God were to “forget you,” you would cease to exist, instantly.  But it would be more than your winking out of existence.  There wouldn’t even be a corpse.  It would be as if you had never existed at all; that you had never been born, and if you had children, they wouldn’t exist either, lacing a parent.  What God forgetting you would amount to would be a large change in history.

One of the properties of God is that he cannot contradict himself.  What’s happened has happened; there’s no changing history.  (It would also imply that God had potentiality, a potential for anther history; but God is all act and has no potential.)  To change history would be for God to contradict himself.  Aquinas holds that because God cannot contradict himself explains why truth is always in harmony with itself.  In reality, which is an embodiment of truth, a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect; this is the law of non-contradiction.  This law exists and is possible because the truth and reality are never self-contradictory.  God will never forget you, because he can’t.

Isaiah was a Jewish prophet who lived about 700 years before the birth of Christ.  Aristotle lived, in Greece, about 350 years after Isaiah.  Isaiah had not the benefit of Greek philosophy on which to base his statement that God would never forget you.  Isaiah’s affirmation could only have come from divine revelation.  That Isaiah was divinely inspired to think such a thing ought to give confidence in belief of his other revelations.

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Trudeau climate plan for the applause, not accomplishment

Vincent J. Curtis

1 April 22

RE: A Good Climate Plan, Will it work? Spectator editorial 1 April 2022.

It’s amazing to me how an immature fool like Justin Trudeau can continually trick hard-boiled and cynical newspaper editors, but he does.

The purpose of Trudeau’s climate plan is to gain applause, which the Spectator gave him.  The fact that the goals are unattainable are written throughout the editorial, but somehow that Trudeau is setting unattainable goals for other people, not him, to accomplish escapes notice.  That Trudeau likely will not be in power to pick up the pieces when this plan fails, and therefore pays no price for failure, escapes attention.  That Trudeau is setting up to blame those dastardly Albertans for spoiling his plan goes unnoticed.  The Spectator is not sensitive to the fact that those dastardly Albertans have the counter-incentive of not destroying their economy.  Lastly, no reporter or editor has been enterprising enough to confronted Mr. Trudeau with the facts of 1.5 percent, of COP26, and of India and China and asked for a reasoned reply to the question ‘why?’, and not accepting his usual brush-off.

Mr. Trudeau is big on setting goals for others to accomplish.  A worthy goal of a government is to balance the budget.  Let’s see if Mr. Trudeau can accomplish that worthy goal that’s entirely within his power to accomplish in the time he has set for others to reduce CO2 output by forty percent.

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Explosive gas in Hamilton

Vincent J. Curtis

1 Apr 22

RE: Hydrogen on the horizon for Hamilton.  Op-ed by Bianca Caramento, Manager of Bay Area Climate Change Council.  The Hamilton Spectator 1 April 22 (this is no April Fool’s Joke!)  The BACCC is obvious a political organization, not a scientific one.

Yet again we see an Arts Major telling us what the science is.  The results are predictable.

Let’s start with hydrogen itself.  It is a colorless, odourless, tasteless gas that boils at -259℃.  Hydrogen is neither blue nor grey nor green, as alleged in the article telling us about science and technology.  Hydrogen has an explosive range in air from 18 percent to 59 percent, and a flammable range from 4 percent to 75 percent, enabling it to create lots of blue and grey in the hands of amateurs.

There are no natural sources of pure hydrogen on earth; it has to be created by either the electrolysis of water or the thermal decomposition of natural gas.  To electrolyze water to generate hydrogen, only to burn it to generate electricity again, should properly appear stupid even to those unfamiliar with the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  To decompose natural gas just for the hydrogen, throwing away the carbon, only makes economic sense in certain, high-value added operations.  One such operation is the making of carbon black; but even in that case the hydrogen is captured and sold as a by-product of the process.

In natural gas, carbon makes up three quarters of the mass and more than half the energy of combustion.  That’s a lot to send to waste.

In their dreamy-eyed desire for a hydrogen future, the Bay Area “Climate Change Council” failed to answer three basic questions: at what cost?; compared to what?; and what hard evidence do you have?

Other facts they failed to reflect upon are: 1.5 percent, China, India, and Beer’s Law.

But that science is too tough.

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