A doctorate in nonsense

Vincent J. Curtis

18 July 22

RE: NATO’s new strategy is dangerous.  Op-ed by Tamara Lorencz. The Hamilton Spectator 18 July 22.

“NATO’s new strategic concept is…a plan to maintain the West’s power and wealth through armed force and the containment of other countries.”  This is what we get from a Ph.D. candidate at the Ballsillie School of International Affairs of Wilfred Laurier University? (I hasten to add, as a UWaterloo science grad!)

So banal, so predictable, so tedious, so moralistic!

I think it was David Hume who observed that you cannot draw a moral conclusion from a set of factual premises.  The Doctor of Philosophy candidate neglected to mention the moral premise behind the moralistic “maintain their power and wealth” crack.  Perhaps the post-modern premise that “if it’s western, it’s evil” is the unsaid premise, but a doctoral thesis dedication to rationality and logic would have necessitated its inclusion.  Except that logic and rationality are western intellectual concepts, and “it its western, its evil.”

Banal tediousness is found in “maintain their power and wealth.”  Is it not possible the NATO powers wish to maintain their independence and freedom through a military alliance? Is the post-modernist doctoral candidate so good at mind-reading that she dismissed this obvious purpose?  Is she not aware that NATO enabled member countries to scrimp on defence spending and enabled more social welfare spending?  Is not “force and containment” deterrence from external aggression, as was feared from the Soviet Union, and is now expressed by Russian in Ukraine?

This product of a Ph.D. candidate is what I’d expect in a Grade 12 social studies essay - from an unimaginative student thinking she’ll get better grades by affirming the prejudices of her teacher.

She concludes, “Canada should reject NATO’s new strategic concept and reconsider our continued membership in this military alliance.”  Do you know how often Canada has been advised to become a neutral country by Leftists?  Do you know how shattering it would be to Canada’s military policy if she pulled out of NATO?  To say nothing of Canada’s diplomatic position in the western world if that were to happen?  All this gets casually ignored, as if the proposal itself had no consequences.  No consideration of why Finland and Sweden, after seven decades and after the fall of the Soviet Union,  are joining NATO.  No consideration of the influence within NATO that Canada would lose if she left.

Like liberal-arts studies programs everywhere, the Ballsillie School is evidently turning out nothing but worthless, post-modernist junk.  Analyses like this are harmful in government advisory bodies because they have no contact with reality.  Business has no use for this junk.  Perhaps with her Ph.D. Dr. Lorencz can get a job managing a Timmies, or, with courses in finance, a job as a bank teller.

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Trudeau Govt gaslights on vaccines

Vincent J. Curtis

15 July 22

RE: First COVID-19 vaccine for kids under five approved. A Canadian Press story by Laura Osman 15 July 22.

RE: Mandatory random testing is returning. A CP story by Laura Osman 15 July 22.

The left hand of the COVID medical freak show doesn’t know what its far-left hand is doing.  It approves vaccines for kids under five, and then demonstrates its confidence in the efficacy of those vaccines by requiring random testing of the fully vaccinated upon entry to Canada.  Well, which is it: do they work, or not?

The CDC in the U.S. found Moderna’s vaccine for kids to be four percent effective.  Young kids don’t’ get COVID, so vaccinating them against nothing produces negligible protection.  This is the junk that’s approved in Canada.  People younger than forty are in greater danger from the seasonal flu than from COVID.  Those are the numbers, but the zombies running public health have their fixations.

Dr. Leslyn Lewis was widely condemned for saying that we were using children to shield adults from sickness, but here it is.  We vaccinate kids to protect others.  But even this fails basic tests of logic.  If vaxxing A protects B, how does it follow that unvaxxed B is a danger to A?  Isn’t A’s vaccination protective of A?  Isn’t A’ protection the basis of B’s protection?  That’s what vaccination used to mean before progressive medicine took hold of COVID. Yet, that’s the justification for vaxxing everyone. Try to “follow the logic, or lack thereof.” On that!

Vaxxing kids is criminal.  Those recommending it ought to be sanctioned, charged, and run out of medicine.  They’re no better than zombies.

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Sir Lanka: It was supposed to be us

Vincent J. Curtis

14 July 22

It was supposed to happen to the United States.  It was supposed to happen to the western world.  But it happened to Sri Lanka first.

Variations of the Green New Deal have been proposed since the beginning of the 1990s, i.e. immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union.  What’s a good Marxist to do after his central project collapsed and discredited his belief system?  Why, he turns to revenge against the United States.  He wants to demolish the economic system that proved superior and was triumphant.  So, good Marxists became progressive environmentalists.  The American economy would be destroyed by ruining its energy supply, and then by any other means.  The western weakness of self-criticism would be exploited.  Hence, Kyoto.  Hence, global warming.

The political leadership of Sri Lanka bought into the most extreme of the nonsense.  They believed they were going to make Sri Lanka rich by 2025 by jumping whole-hog into green energy and net zero.  Fertilizer imports were banned.  The returns are now in, and the consequences are in the news.

The Sri Lankan economy has collapsed.  The country is without food, money, a functioning energy grid, and now a president.  The Prime Minister it without a house, his having been torched by the mobs.

Dutch farmers are acting like Canadian truckers because their government wants to ban fertilizer and kill cows.  Fertilizer releases “nitrogen,” a greenhouse gas!  They want cows banned because they release methane, another “GHG.”  Those running the Netherlands couldn’t pass Grade 9 chemistry.

To be generous, by “nitrogen” they likely mean nitrous oxide, N₂O, which indeed is active in the infra-red.  It is present in the atmosphere at less than 5 ppm, and it degrades to nitrogen and oxygen under the influence of UV light.  So, it doesn’t persist.  Neither does methane, cow flatulence or natural gas, present at about 2 ppm.  It gets converted into carbon dioxide and water in the atmosphere.  These gases aren’t used in a greenhouse, but they get called GHG’s because they’re active in the infra-red.

Mankind is in no danger from “global warming” or “climate change,” and that’s why the matter cannot be discussed.  You have to shut-up and act immediately, immediately!  Never mind India and China!!  That, in turn, betrays the political motivation of climate change, as explained in paragraph 2.  If you read my piece on “Beer’s Law and Climate Change,” and “Molecular mechanism of global warming” you’ll understand the scientific reasons why anthropogenic climate change is bunkum.  The reason you see so many claims from allegedly reputable scientists about climate change has to do with $$$, in particular their next research grant.  When science is guided by the hand of government, you don’t bite the hand that feeds you, and if all it takes is to toss a little incense into the temple of the climate god to get your next paycheque, that’s what you do.  Being a Marxist helps ease the conscience, because, if you’re a Marxist, you don’t have one.  Change the funding bias against climate change, and watch the change in outlook of scientific publications.

As for the average person, look at Sri Lanka and imagine that that’s what’s in store for us.

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Tell ‘em what they want to hear: another climate story

Vincent J. Curtis

13 July 22

RE: Rich nations cause climate harm to poorer nations.  By Seth Borenstein and Drew Costley, an AP news story published in the Hamilton Spectator 13 July 22.

If you really want to suck someone in to a scam, tell them something that confirms their biases.  Several years ago a completely fake and meaningless paper was submitted for peer review that confirmed the progressive biases of the editors and likely reviewers.  Despite being turgid and essentially meaningless, it got published.  And so we arrive at an allegedly scientific paper that confirms progressive biases, alleging that rich nations harm poor nations in their climates.  The balderdash is so cheeky, it actually quantifies the “harm” in dollar terms to three significant digits.  That precision ought to be a clue.

In the 1970s, acid rain was a big environmental issue in Ontario.  Despite there being little doubt about the actual effect, nobody attempted to quantify in dollar terms the damage done to Ontario’s lakes, never mind to three significant digits.  That ought to serve as another clue in this case.

Let’s grant for the moment the theory of anthropogenic global warming.  The theory forecasts what will happen in the year 2100.  The effect had not allegedly begun in 1990, which the paper claims is the start of its analysis.  It stops in 2014 because by then India and China had built so many coal-fired power plants that they were out-producing the United States, the alleged evil-doer, and but also well before temperatures began to rise.  This period would include the so-called global warming pause of 1998 to 2015.

When alleged scientists play economist, check you wallets.

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Yes, you can put this down as another hoax.

Will Halton be bamboozled? Woke bullying vs. Catholicism

Editors;

RE: Halton Catholic school board faces accusations of anti-Black racism

The Catholic Church is justly famous for its intellectual rigor.  The Christian faith as we know it today is the product of the theology of Jerusalem passing through the philosophy of Greece.  Thomas Aquinas, who set the standard for Scholasticism, was a Dominican monk who taught at the Sorbonne in Paris in the 13^th century.  Then, there are the Jesuits.  Will the Halton Catholic Board demonstrate anything like the intellectual rigor traditional of Catholic institutions in the face of boilerplate progressive accusations and standard bullying practices?  Past performance is not favorable.

The most obvious failing in the accusations is over-generalization.  One “staff member” uses the N-word – context unknown – and this proves anti-Black racism present at the Board.  Failure to act at the pace set by the accuser is an indication of the depth of the problem.

A second weakness is a failure to put the complaints in a Catholic context.  Catholicism is all about the individual, but the accusations all involve standard progressivist groups.

Another give-away is the usual progressivist jargon: “evidence-based data,” (which the Halton Board does not keep) “macroaggression,” “traumatizing,” and so forth.  So are the alleged solutions, “police-free, professional-development, policy review, data collection, inclusive curriculum, response mechanisms, equity,” and other time-wasting, expensive, and harassing measures.  You’d never know they were talking about Catholic teachers and a Catholic school system.

Progressives pride themselves on the sensitivity to intersectionality and the needs of victim groups, but they exhibit no sensitivity to the audience they’re addressing in this instance, namely practicing Catholics.  They’re being treated the same as confused, fallen-away liberal protestants.

Perhaps the problem lies in the massive chip on the shoulder of the accuser.

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Descending in fascism? Hey, if that's what it takes

Vincent J. Curtis

12 July 22

RE: Omicron the scariest COVID yet. Spectator editorial 12 July 22.

“COVID isn’t about us....[it’s] never about just us.  They’re always about other people.”  “It’s not just seniors who suffer disproportionately.”  “For other people, COVID is still scary.”  “All of us need to play a role in combatting COVID because everyone is affected when anyone’s infected and vulnerable people are affected the most.”  ”We must therefore redouble our efforts…Redoubling our effects means protecting ourselves first and vaccinations remains an essential tool in the arsenal.  That means laying plans for a fourth shot.”  Mussolini couldn’t have put the argument more clearly.

Here’s the rub: the vaccines don’t work.  In fact, the evidence may show that they are counter-productive, leaving multi-vaccinated people more vulnerable than the unvaccinated at this stage.

Omicron was wildly contagious but had milder symptoms.  Yet, more people died under Omicron than under the alpha and delta variants?  Alpha and delta were faced without vaccines.  When Omicron came along, more than three quarters of the population were double vaxxed.  Finding double vaccination didn’t stop the Omicron wave, a third dose was called for, and it proved a failure.  We are now discovering excess deaths in alarming numbers in young and middle-aged people – people who didn’t need vaccination to combat COVID themselves but got vaxxed anyway.

The fascist approach to fighting COVID has proven a disaster.  Let’s stop pushing it, shall we?

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The editorial exhibits a strange desire for fascist methods to achieve a progressive aim, which I am pleased to point out.

The Charter means what it says

Vincent J. Curtis

11 July 22

RE: Top court ruling fails Canadians.  Op-ed by Craig Wallace.  The Hamilton Spectator 11 July 22. “The charter of Rights and Freedoms allows for restrictions on rights, to better protect society.” he says.

That’s all this country needs: a Supreme Court that takes a more restrictive view of rights guaranteed under the Charter.  That the Charter really doesn’t mean what it says, it means less.  Disregard the word ‘guaranteed.’

The restrictions on Charter rights that occurred during the pandemic and the freezing of bank accounts after declaration of the Emergencies Act show how little regard there is for Charter rights by those with political power – by those who command the men with officially sanctioned guns.  The only power a single individual has against the government lies in the courts, and if the courts are against you as a matter of policy, then Canada is no better than the Soviet Union, China, or North Korea.  The only difference being the stomach the political leaders have for the rigorous enforcement of their will.

Suppose the government said society needed protection from white supremacism.  Should the courts agree and allow for the suppression of certain kinds of speech and beliefs?  What about the arrest and detention of individuals for expressing and publicizing politically obnoxious views?

The Charter is the one instrument the court has to protect the individual rights of Canadians from the exercise of government power.  It would be foolish to indulge the government of the day its demand to restrict rights for the better protection of society.

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