Is Hamilton run by idiots?

Vincent J. Curtis

19 Mar 21

RE: Lockdown predicted for Hamilton

Hamilton must be run by idiots, idiots who don’t follow the science, don’t learn from experience, and are, by Einstein’s definition, insane – doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

The science is that lockdowns do nothing to change the course of the pandemic.  The experience of two waves in Ontario is that lockdowns initially force case numbers to go up because people who are confined to apartment buildings or multi-unit dwellings eventually are all breathing the same air.  There isn’t a single scientific study that shows that lockdowns work, and if one did, it could say what works well and what doesn’t.

The purpose of lockdowns was always to protect the health care system from being overwhelmed.  It was never to “stop the spread.”  In the course of two waves, the health care system was never close to being overwhelmed, and so why is prospect, the threat, of yet another lockdown being raised now?  The health care system is under no pressure.  If you think lockdowns will slow the spread, read paragraph 1 again.  Lockdowns control people, they don’t control the virus.

Except for the extremely sick, a little infection never hurt anyone.  That’s why it’s better to be out and about strengthening your immune system by constantly fighting off little sicknesses.  Problems arise when one’s immune system is allowed to get lazy from lack of challenge.  Use it, or lose it; and the so-called experts are forcing people to lose it.

When are people going to wise up and rise up against the stupidity that is running the city, the province, and the country?

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We need hate speech like food needs spice

Vincent J. Curtis

18 Mar 21

RE: Are we doing enough to stop hate from winning in Canada?  Another tedious op-ed piece in the Hamilton Spectator 18 Mar 21.

Image a world in which all that was allowed to be said and only those who were allowed to speak were decided by Paul Berton.  This living hell is what Mohamed Fakih wishes upon Canada!  And he wishes it because of a personal problem he has with a particular native-born Canadian.

This fellow took extreme exception to Mr. Fakih’s heritage, and expressed himself in ways that fell far short of Canadian standards of niceness.  Mr. Fakih sued, won judgement, and – surprise - has yet to collect.  Suddenly, this is Canada’s problem.  Fakih’s experience means that all Canada has a problem with hate speech, and Canada has to fix it.  (Here Fakih implicitly accepts his opponent’s basic premise that there are no individuals, only categories of people.  His opponent is representative of all white Canadians.)

So far as the effectiveness of the civil courts go, welcome to Canada!  But the business of controlling speech because someone might say something a sensitive person might regard as hateful, well, the cure is worse than that disease.  A predicable drone that bores nearly everyone ultimately results.  Viz, liberal talk radio.  Viz a certain newspaper!

Speech police already regard Catholic teaching as homophobic.  There are passages from the holy scripts of Islam that, coming from the lips of an Imam, might sound like hate speech, especially to Jews.  So, be careful about what you wish for.  Your side won’t always hold sway.

Tolerating hate speech is better than controlling speech because somebody has to decide what wrongspeech is.  Cancel culture exists because we’re already too far into controlling speech.  One day, it could be someone like me who has the power to decide who gets cancelled!

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Systemic change: eliminate democracy

Vincent J. Curtis

17 Mar 21

RE: Public School Board needs systemic change.  By Kevin Gonci.  Op-ed piece in the Hamilton Spectator 17 Mar 21.  Pull quote: “We have a long way to go before students can feel safe and protected in our school system.”

There’s that word again: “systemic.”  To be clear, in the context of the article, “systemic” change amounts to constraining or eliminating democracy.

In all the bad examples offered in the article, they boil down to the trustees, not the system.  Trustees don't understand Roberts Rules of Order.  Trustees say impolitic things.  Trustees clash with commissioners who are supposed to police their conduct.  Let’s face it, the systemic change that would eliminate all these problems with trustees is to eliminate the trustee position altogether and let the bureaucrats run everything unsupervised.

Democracy is messy, and electing incompetent, self-serving people is always possible. But that’s on the people, the electors.  Presently, it’s not legally up to a self-selected few to decide that the people made the wrong choice, and then veto that choice in the middle of a term in the interests of some greater good, as they see it. (1) The electorate can’t be trusted to make the right choice, so why give them the chance of making a mistake?  Eliminating school boards is systemic change that fixes that problem.

Putting in supervision that keeps school board trustees from making mistakes is also undemocratic, systemic change that addresses the problem.

These are solutions for those who either lack patience or simply don’t believe in democratic choice.  Democratic selection confers moral authority on the representative, and if you are of a certain political philosophy, that moral authority can interfere with your political agenda.

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1. This line of reasoning will be very familiar to Trump supporters.

A chemist without solutions

Vincent J. Curtis

15 Mar 21.

RE: Do we have the will to save the planet? Written by Jeffery Atkinson, professor of chemistry in the faculty of mathematics and science at Brock University.  Hamilton Spectator op-ed 15 Mar 21.

It was embarrassing to read the article by a Brock professor of chemistry that argued for global warming.  Chemistry contains the knowledge required to refute the whole theory of global warming, and here the chemistry guy is pointing in the wrong direction.

Let’s go through his evidence point by point.  First up is the freezing over of the Great Lakes.  The last time the Great Lakes nearly completely froze over was in February, 2014.  The long term average maximum ice cover is fifty-five percent.  The lack of a freeze over of the Great Lakes is not something a climate crazy can hang his hat on.

‘Why isn’t the same urgency brought to fighting global warming as was brought to defeating Germany and Japan in WWII?’  The Axis powers represented an immediate existential threat to western civilization, whereas eighty years from now global temperatures might have risen by a degree or two, to conditions the world has seen previously.

‘Why is there no global coordinated response?’  What are the Paris Accord (2015), the Kyoto Treaty (1995), and, going way back, the Montreal Protocols (1976) (remember the “ozone hole?) if not coordinated, global responses?

The chemistry prof seems unaware of the global cooling – ice age scare of the 1970s.  There simply hasn’t been a continuous rise in global temperatures since 1896.  There was a rise from 1900 to 1938, a fall from 1939 to 1979, a rise to 1998, and then a pause to 2018.  Has the chemistry prof ever heard of UAH?  Has he looked at the atmospheric absorption spectra and reflected upon the significance of water vapor and the complete absorption at 15 microns?  My guess is no.

When he speaks of “weaning us off fossil fuels” he seems unaware of China, India, and the significance of 1.5 percent.  Speaking of fossil fuels, the coal beds we mine today were laid down when atmospheric CO2 levels were in the thousands of ppm.  In fact, the coal beds are where a lot of that atmospheric carbon ended up.  Life survives, and adapts, to high and low CO2 levels.

When he speaks of ice loss in the Arctic, he seems unaware of the data available from the Danish Meteorological Institute.  There is no long term trend from 2006 to the present of ice loss in the Arctic Ocean or loss of ice in Greenland.

The prof seems to have flown into irrational panic when he speaks of loss of fresh water, and loss of sustainable food sources.  How?  How is Canada going to lose its fresh water? Warmer weather and higher CO2 content in the atmosphere promotes plant growth.  This is pretty basic chemistry.  Grass grows, and cattle eat grass.  I’ve seen it.

After this, the prof descends into appeals to authority, in a way that makes the authorities seem out-of-touch, paranoid, or absurd.

The prof is quite wrong when he says, “We must raise our courage for radical system-shaking change.  We have no choice.”  In the first place, we can choose to not listen to him, and have good grounds not to listen.  One of those grounds is to recognize that when an expert in chemistry starts offering political solutions, he does so as a non-expert.  Especially when that expert is oblivious of facts he ought to know about before putting his case.

Altogether embarrassing that a chemist would write such nonsense in support of global warming theory.  And write such nonsense!

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The mask as a symbol – of stupidity

Vincent J. Curtis

14 Mar 21

RE: The Mask as Symbol.  An editorial by Paul Berton editor in chief of the Hamilton Spectator.  (Berton is an extreme progressive.)

As usual in progressive analysis, people can be divided into two types: the smart and the stupid.  More particularly, those who obey the dictates of progressivism, and those who object.  This is the sort of argument used to convince lemmings.

The argument is that mask wearing is smart, and objecting to them is, in the ultimate analysis, stupid.  This time last year, the progressive position was that masks are unnecessary, and besides, what PPE we have should be saved for health care workers.  Then, in July, mask wearing became the rage – as the excuse for lifting the first lockdown.  Mask mandates date from the very beginning of the second wave, and a U.S. study showed that eighty percent of people who caught COVID wore masks all the time.  Wearing useless masks may have given a false sense of security.

The problem with mask wearing is that nearly all masks don’t work against viruses.  Unless the mask is NIOSH approved – and surgical masks aren’t – they have little chance of adding to the protection you get from social distancing.  It used to be that you wore a mask when social distancing was impossible, and now you’re supposed to wear two masks while outdoors and alone.  This is a sure sign that mask wearing doesn’t do much.

If mask wearing worked, people wouldn’t need encouragement, let alone shaming.  But masks don’t work, and all the orders and shaming turns the mask wearing into a symbol of cultural control – between progressivism and the smart people.

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The hating anti-hate groups

Vincent J. Curtis

11 Mar 21

RE: McMaster instructor under fire for comments.  Hamilton Spectator 11 Mar 21

This is going to be an interesting test of the strength of the homosexual lobby against the Charter Rights of freedom of speech and freedom of religion. 

The Catholic Church has been theologically hostile to homosexuality since the days of St. Paul.  Catholic philosophy closely follows the Scholasticism of St Thomas Aquinas.  Aquinas held that being was metaphysically good, and being acting in accordance with its nature was good.  Being not acting in accordance with its nature was lacking in goodness.  This is where the “intrinsically disordered” description of homosexuality comes into Catholic teaching.  Homosexuality is disordered because it is in the nature of human beings (their “order”) to reproduce, and human reproduction, which causes a new being – something good – is impossible in homosexual acts.  Aquinas provides metaphysical justification for St. Paul’s theology.

Notice that the teaching condemns homosexuality, not the homosexual, who, as a being, is metaphysically good. (“The sin, not the sinner.”)

It ought to be embarrassing to the Toronto Catholic school board not just to get a lesson on basic Catholic teaching, but to need it!  It would be greatly disordered of a Catholic Board to show support for sinning - homosexuality – keeping in mind the distinction between being and act.

That LGBT advocacy groups (Big Ho) would immediately attempt to destroy Mr. Jody Maillet with accusations of hate speech is not surprising.  They aren’t interested in fine philosophical distinctions, or the human rights of anybody.  They are only interested in demonstrating power, the power of their hate, and they hope to intimidate McMaster University, once a Baptist College, into dismissing Mr. Maillet as a display of that power.  Harassment of Mr. Maillet by the police, who would be investigating a charge of hate speech, would be a bonus twist.

However, Mr. Maillet doesn’t need the Mac teaching gig, and the only people who will be hurt are those students trying to learn the insurance business.

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Plutocrat Progressives Cancel Working Class Progressives

Vincent J. Curtis

10 Mar 21

RE: HuffPost shuts down Canadian operations.

The question raised by the Huffington Post shutting down its Canadian operation is how long it will take the labor unions and working-class left to figure out that the plutocratic left are plutocrats first, and progressives second.

HuffPost’s Canadian employees had filed to form a union, and the union was informed five minutes before its first meeting with the big cheese of HuffPost’s owner that everybody was being laid off and the operation they worked for closed.

Jeff Bezos’ Amazon is fighting unionization of some of its U.S. distribution centers.  Bezos’ fortune approximately doubled from $70 Billion to $140 Billion during the pandemic, and you’d think a guy flush with that kind of wealth could afford to be a little more generous to his employees.  But no.

Silicon Valley progressives became plutocrats unhindered by the progressive left partly on the strength of their technology being cool platforms for the advancement of progressivism.  But now they’re plutocrats, and you don’t touch their money.  You can oppress and despise the old middle and working classes all you like.  You can spend their tax dollars on all the nihilist things you want that destroy their values.  You can even pretend to take tax dollars from us because our accountants know how to avoid paying too much.  Thus the Plutocratic Progressive thinks.

So, just like Animal Farms when the pigs began to look just like the humans they replaced, Silicon Valley progressives became plutocrats, and now they’re plutocrats first and that progressive stuff is for the other people.  Plutocratic progressives are not subject to the ramifications of their ideology.

That means what when ardent progressive workies ask for a raise and better working conditions, their plutocratic progressive masters say that progressivism only goes so far with us; not with our money, and, oh, by the way, you're cancelled.

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