Flacking for the Liberal Party

Vincent J. Curtis

14 Aug 15

My hometown newspaper published an opinion piece by Toronto Star columnist Thomas Walkom.  It should come as no surprise to anyone that the Toronto Star acts an organ of the Liberal party.  This column is of that genre, but this piece went a little too far in scaremongering.

Often, it is hard to tell the difference between a Toronto Star columnist and a flack for the Liberal Party.

Such is the case of Thomas Walkom.  In his columned headlined, “Harper has shown dislike for CPP, too” Walkom makes worrisome noises about the fate of the CPP should Harper be returned as Prime Minister.  One can infer from Walkom that Harper would shut down the CPP, perhaps leaving current and soon-to-be recipients of the CPP in the lurch.  Needlessly frightening the elderly is bad enough, but Walkom is flat wrong on all counts.

Too lazy to call the Conservative campaign or look things up on the Internet, he would have discovered a few things that would have spoiled his column had he bothered.  The fact is that Harper moved to ensure the solvency of the CPP.

Had Walkom done some research he would have found that on 26 May 2015 the Conservative government announced that the CPP would be adjusted to accept voluntary expansion of the CPP.  A person wishing receive a greater CPP payment in retirement can voluntarily pay more into the plan during their working career.  This is not the move of a government intent on eliminating the CPP.

The voluntary expansion of CPP idea meets Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne’s call for a provincial pension plan.  Unless you believe that Ontarians are children who need more government coercion in order to save for retirement.

The difference between Harper and Wynne is that Harper believes and expects adults to act like adults, whereas Wynne believes most adults are too irresponsible to look after themselves.

Walkom evidently buys into Wynne’s elitist assumption that government knows best.

Flacking for a political party, Walkom is not one to let facts get in the way of a story line during an election.
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P.S.  A couple of points.  The tactic of frightening pensioners was employed by the Democratic party against Republican Newt Gingrich in the late 1990's.  Gingrich proposed a voluntary alternative to Social Security that would be so good to the younger generation that Social Security would wither away.  The wither away comment was taken out of context, and employed in a fear-mongering campaign that ended Gingrich's proposal.  So the tactic of scaring old people unnecessarily is well-known and effective.

P.P.S.  The proposed voluntary additional contributions to CPP points out the folly of relying too heavily on pension plans for retirement.  The pension dies with the pensioner, and if a person died at aged 66, then all those additional contributions stay in the plan for someone else instead of staying in the estate of the pensioner, as would happen had he contributed to an RRSP instead.  A diversified retirement portfolio would not rely too heavily on government pensions.

If not a provincial plan, then what?

Vincent J. Curtis

13 Aug 15

My hometown newspaper published an editorial of today's date in which they argued that Harper was bad because he would not cooperate with Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne in creating an Ontario pension plan.  The case was based upon straightforward special pleading.  Special pleading occurs when the arguer says that his case should be accepted because he is special.  Below is a response.

The editorial today was a straightforward case of special pleading.  The arguments put forward by Kathleen Wynne, which The Spectator supports, are not privileged.  Wynne may have a majority, but as of this date, so does Harper.

The people with some business sense, which would include the Harper government, say the Ontario pension plan scheme would be a job-killer because she would be adding a further payroll tax.  That argument should be respected, or at least countered with something.  If it is respected, then The Spectator should argue why, nevertheless, it should be implemented anyway.

The Spectator put down Harper’s objections to another public pension plan as sheer ideology.  Well, expanding the power of government is an ideological commitment in itself, and adding a payroll tax to redistribute twenty years from now adds to the power of government.

The Spectator apparently is satisfied with treating people like children who cannot look after themselves.  It may well be true that most people are like children who cannot look after themselves, but it takes an elitist to say that you know better and you know what is in their best interests.

The way The Spectator put the problem - if not this, then what? - reveals an ideological commitment to larger government.  Before 1966, families, churches and charities handled the aged indigent.  More government doesn’t have to be the answer to everything.  And it is not obvious that indigence is a problem for the aged.

Already, we have RRSPs, tax free savings accounts, and other tax shelters intended to encourage people to save for retirement.  You seem to feel that coercion is necessary.

I view Wynne’s pension proposal as a back-door tax increase.  The beauty of it is that she gets to borrow money from the new plan to pay for her green infrastructure program, and twenty years from now she won’t be the premier responsible for making good on her promises of pension payments.

What we will get is another fiscally unsound government program that will eat up the budgets of governments yet to come.

You don’t have a democracy when adults are treated like children.  People simply have to act responsibly, and the consequences of making poor choices in life, and real examples of not accepting responsibility for oneself, provide reasons for acting responsibly throughout one’s life.
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Ranked Balloting: Here we go again!

Vincent J. Curtis

24 July 15

My hometown newspaper ran an article concerning so-called ranked balloting.  It purports to be a fairer way of electing representatives, and the advocates want the method demonstrated in Ontario municipal elections.  Ontario has been here before, and it is the same group that went down in flames four years ago that are trying again.  The defeat four years ago was about as decisive as you can get, and the method lost on the merits, i.e. on the intellectual argument.  I know this because I started the anti-MPRR ball rolling, at the request of my wife.

Below are remarks directed at the latest effort by meddlesome do-gooders who won't take "get lost" for an answer.

It was only a couple of elections ago that Ontario pronounced upon mixed member proportional representation, a scheme similar to ranked balloting.  MMPR went down to decisive defeat, 60 % against, 40 % in favor: a shocking loss since nearly the entire political establishment favored it at the time.  Now we are seeing the same idea being presented through the back door.

The advocates for replacing our current method of plurality election lack the decency of waiting a generation for trying again, or at least coming up with better arguments.  What is the point of holding elections when people don’t respect the results?

Plurality election, in which he who has the most votes wins, has been employed in the English-speaking world since the first call of Parliament in the 13^th century.  It has been with us so long that the method doesn’t have a name; being the only kind in its genus it has never needed one.  It is accepted.  “First-past-the-post” is a pejoriative, term of ridicule.  Plurality election is the proper term.

Ranked balloting, MMPR, and the like are solutions to a non-problem.  Nobody doubts that the winner by plurality is the winner.  So, what is this question about results being not-democratic?  Everybody accepts the outcome of plurality election, and you can't get more legitimate than that.

Not getting too far into the metaphysical weeds, if plurality election is undemocratic, then “ranked balloting”, MMPR, and the like are means of burying the fallacy they purport to eliminate.  If plurality election is undemocratic, the results of ranked balloting are still undemocratic.  The winner of a ranked ballot was nobody’s first choice!  All we get with ranked balloting is the result of plurality election put through a mathematical formula.  (Let me have control of the formula, and I'll shut up about it!)

Gauzy new means of elections carry exactly the same alleged problem they are advocated to solve; they just bury the problem differently.  Therefore, it is better to stick with the simple, the tried and the true.

And while we are at it let’s start calling our current means of election “plurality election”, rather than “first-past-the-post” election, the latter being a partisan term.

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As an afterthought: a democracy has no means of defending itself from a fanatical minority, who can keep renewing the struggle.  Eventually, democracy tires of resistance and surrenders to fanaticism.  Then, there is no going back.  I am worried about resistance to MPRR wearing out.  MPRR and the like are bad ideas.

Blowing the lid off Hillary's Claim to have handled no Classified Material on her server.

Vincent J. Curtis

31 July 2015

It would be fruitful for FoxNews to look into how documents get classified in the U.S. government, and what briefings senior appointees from outside the regular bureaucracy receive concerning the generation of classified material.

For example, every cable originating from an overseas embassy ought initially to be classified as “secret” or “top secret”, depending upon the nature of the material.  Political appointees as Ambassadors surely receive briefings, if not downright training sessions, on the sensitive material their embassy generates.

In Canada, the originator of a government document is the initial authority for the classification of that document.   He or she can classify a document up to the highest level to which they are cleared.  Later, a document may be reviewed by those charged with maintaining government secrets, and that subsequent authority can lower, or increase, the security classification of the document, depending upon the sensitivity of the material.  The system in the United States cannot be too different from that.

As Secretary of State, Hillary ought to be generating classified documents constantly.  Her deliberations with her staff ought to be initially classified as secret, and any advice she tendered to the President ought to be considered as secret or top secret, initially.

In short, anything substantive pertaining to her job as Secretary of State ought to be initially classified as secret, or top secret by Hillary, herself!  She ought to have received a briefing upon her assumption of office on the protocols concerning the generation, handling and classification of sensitive material.

If FoxNews or similar news outlet can find a retired bureaucrat who can explain how sensitive material is classified in the U.S. government, they can blow the lid off Hillary’s statement that she handled no classified material on her personal server.  Her recommendation that her staff look into the advice of Sidney Blumenthal ought to have been classed as “secret.”

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Faith Communities and the Environmental Bandwagon

Vincent J. Curtis

31 July 2015

In the July 22, 2015 edition of my hometown newspaper, author and activist Beatrice Ekwa Ekoko wrote a piece headlined, "Faith Communities need to get on the environmental bandwagon."

Below is a response.

Last week, Beatrice Ekwa Ekoko described the efforts of those in the environmental movement to gain the active support of Christian Churches.  She spoke of showing Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” but what really got traction, in her view, was the recent encyclical of Pope Francis.

Ekoko was somewhat mystified by the reluctance of Christian faith communities to get deeply involved in the environmentalist movement.  She recognizes that Christian churches for centuries have been involved in seeking social justice, and could not understand why they were not similarly enthused by a call for “climate justice.”

Ekoko will likely continue to be disappointed in Christian faith communities.  Environmentalism bears the hallmarks of a religion itself, as a review of the terms Deep Ecology and Gaia will show.  The Christian community have notions of about worshiping God, and God is not “Mother Earth,” the goddess of the environmentalist movement.  Thus, the secular aspects of environmentalism may be of some interest to the secular part of Christians, but the deeper philosophical import of environmentalism will prove to be off-putting to a serious Christian.

Hence, you can get Christians to grow a victory garden, or put solar panels on the roof of their church.  These are things that are not obvious endorsements of the concept of a Mother Earth.

Climate justice is not at all like social justice to a Christian.  Social justice involves human beings, living creatures of God, who are endowed with rationality and capable of understanding God in a limited way.  Climate, in contrast, is not even a real thing with substance; it is a rational construction of the human mind.  Justice is not a concept that applies to it.  It may be possible to smudge the distinction between making nice to Mother Earth and acting for the interests of the human beings that live on earth, but the openness to the concept of climate justice to a concept of Mother Earth or Gaia cannot be hidden.

Christians, as a rule, take the idea of Truth quite seriously.  Thoughtful Christians would be astonished at Al Gore’s propaganda epic “An Inconvenient Truth.”  The Inconvenient Truth about “An Inconvenient Truth” is that the movie is full of distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsehoods, as a U.K. court ruled several years ago.  People are generally aware that there is something wrong with Al Gore’s movie, and Christians are uncomfortable with lying, even if it is for the sake of a cause thought to be good.

Hence, Ekoko will continue to be disappointed by faith communities.  They already have a religion.

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Reconciliation through Condescension and Corruption

Vincent J. Curtis

9 July 2015

In an article published in the Hamilton Spectator on July 8, 2015, columnist Carol Goar describes the actions being contemplated by Canadian universities to “Take the lead on national reconciliation.”

The column is subtitled, "Universities aim to 'decolonize' their courses and campuses."

In brief, what Carol Goar describes is more condescension towards Indians and intellectual corruption of the university courses as means towards ‘national’ reconciliation.

I put the word 'national' in quotes because First Nations regard themselves as self-determining peoples who exist outside of Canada.  Indians may have Canadian citizenship, but their official position is that they are not Canadian.  If Indians are not Canadian, then reconciliation is not national.

The condescension arises in the form of “soft bigotry of low expectations.”  Indians are not expected to perform at the level of white Europeans, and so extra effort must be made to get them into university and to make them feel comfortable in the world of new ideas.  At least, if the descriptions made by Goar are true.  These actions are as follows:

-          Bring the rate of university graduation among indigenous people up to the national average.  Effectively, this means increasing the proportion of degreed indigenous from 9 % to 28 %.  Universities are going to work with elementary and secondary schools to create a supportive learning environment for aboriginal students, and provide bridge programs to span the gap between a high school graduate indigenous and a high school graduate from Canada.

-          Special programs on campus to help indigenous succeed.

-          “Decolonize” Canada’s universities.  That means blending western science with indigenous knowledge, and integrating aboriginal perspectives into Canadian scholarship and learning.

-          Urge other institutions to reset their relationship with indigenous Canadians. [Never mind that “indigenous Canadians” is a contradiction in terms, since an indigenous not Canadian.]

Plainly, indigenous are not expected to perform as well as white Europeans, or else these special programs would not be required.  Forget that reconciliation is demanded for having once tried to force a European education upon the Indians, and here these universities are offering the same poison but without the coercion.  It is not hard to foresee that if the goal is to achieve a given number, the quality of the degreed indigenous will become suspect.  That 9 % earned their degree, without special help.  Forcing the number up to 28 % will cause the quality of those degrees to decline, bringing them all under suspicion.

Intellectual corruption arises in the effort to blend western science with indigenous knowledge.  Perhaps that corruption has already taken place, since the conceiver of that proposal obviously is unaware of the unity of truth.  Science is an organized body of knowledge.  There is no “western” science, as such.  There is only science, since knowledge is of the true, and truth is a unity.  There is only one truth, and that truth is for all.  There is no western truth, no indigenous truth; no true for you but false for me.

Insofar as indigenous knowledge is actual knowledge, it is true.  There is no indigenous knowledge of mathematics, chemistry, or physics that is distinct, different, and requiring of “blending”.  If indigenous knowledge is actual knowledge, then it is likely found already in one of the sciences.

Plainly reconciliation is being attempted by well-intentioned but highly uninformed people.  It seems that Europeans instinctively condescend to others, and that condescension is fully on display here, by these universities.  Special things are done in order to make it possible, or at least appear, that Indigenous can do as well in school as those educated in Canada.  Perhaps this is seen as a form of politeness.

Universities are prepared to compromise on the principle of the unity of truth in order to effect this “reconciliation.”

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Obama in Agreement with Fundamental Principles Re: ISIS

Vincent J. Curtis

8 July 2015

President Barack Obama spoke on Monday on the achieving of 5,000 airstrikes against ISIS since last summer.  In the course of his remarks, he recognized the near impossibility of destroying an ideology by military means alone.  From military science we know that to defeat an ideology it may require a competitive idea, or it may require the passage of time, when the ideology simply passes out of fashion.

His exact remarks are as follows:

[ISIS] relies on fear, sometimes executing its own disillusioned fighters. Its unrestrained brutality often alienates those under its rule,

…our strategy recognizes that no amount of military force will end the terror that is ISIL unless it’s matched by a broader effort -- political and economic -- that addresses the underlying conditions that have allowed ISIL to gain traction

…in order for us to defeat terrorist groups like ISIL and al Qaeda it's going to also require us to discredit their ideology -- the twisted thinking that draws vulnerable people into their ranks

It’s going to be up to Muslim communities, including scholars and clerics, to keep rejecting warped interpretations of Islam, and to protect their sons and daughters from recruitment.

But what is it that makes ISIS, ISIS?  It is its strict interpretation of Islam, of Sharia law, and the opportunity for self-appointed guardians of Islam to impose Islamic punishments.  ISIS represents the fullest application of Sharia and Islam.  It is the most authentic Islam that presently exists on earth.  And what is found is that such application is intolerable, even among those raised in such a culture.

Where Obama is wrong is where he says that Muslim scholars and clerics keep rejecting warped interpretations of Islam.  Muslim scholars and clerics don’t reject ISIS’s interpretation of Islam because it is Islam.  The most authentic kind, in fact.  I have yet to hear of a consensus emerging among Islamic scholars that ISIS is engaged in heresy.  And one won’t because every ISIS action can be justified on the basis of some passage or other of Islam’s holy books, which testifies to its authenticity.

As a practical matter, ISIS is proving the utter impracticality of Sharia law.  It is absurd to propose that God made man in order to make him miserable, and Sharia law – supposedly God-made - is making men miserable.  But if Sharia is false, then all Islam is false.

The atrocities committed by ISIS and the suffering of the Muslims who live under ISIS rule demonstrate that Sharia law is false.  God did not create Sharia law.  Sharia law does not follow from God’s words, despite the claims of Islamic scholars.  Islamic scholars are silent in the face of the atrocities of ISIS, which means that they understand that the Sharia law applied by ISIS and the punishments imposed by ISIS for the violation of Sharia law are all authentic Islam.  And the application of Sharia by ISIS proves to the world that Sharia is false.  And that therefore Islam is false.

How can Muslims who are suffering under ISIS and are discovering the falsity of Sharia and, consequently, of Islam repudiate ISIS?  What is that competitive idea that can defeat the ideology of ISIS?  What can make that ideology pass out of fashion?

That competitive idea, the one that repudiates ISIS’s ideology, that result which can make that ideology pass out of fashion is Christianity and the widespread adoption of Christianity by the people under ISIS rule.  If there was widespread conversion to Christianity of the people under ISIS rule, the caliphate so precious to ISIS would cease to be dar al Islam.  It would cease to be Islamic territory, and become Christian territory. Such an event would not only repudiate ISIS and its ideology, but it would cause Islam itself to begin to pass out of intellectual fashion.  And there is no reason why a Muslim would want to hang on to Islam since ISIS has now proved that Islam is false.

President Barack Obama is on the right track when he says that military force alone will not defeat the ideology of ISIS.  That ideology is authentic Islam.  ISIS is doing a good job on its own to discredit Islam.  Where Obama errs is in his belief that Islamic scholars and clerics will reject the “warped interpretations of Islam”, because those interpretations are not warped; they are authentic Islam.  For political reasons, and perhaps personal ones too, Obama cannot make a full-throated call for the Muslims under ISIS rule to reject Islam and become Christian.

Nevertheless, widespread conversion is what needs to happen.

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