Vincent J. Curtis
27 Apr 20
Certain
tactics used by progressives have become a sign of guilt. The question
was put, whether or to what degree Dr. Theresa Tam worked on behalf of the
People’s Republic of China in respect of the world response to the coronavirus
pandemic. Significantly, progressives did not begin their defense of Dr.
Tam with the word “no.”
Instead,
they began with the predictable cry of “racist!” and then proceeded to change
the subject. The original question was changed to why won’t members of
the Conservative party condemn their leadership candidate for his evident
racism? Not finding enough Conservatives to do so, progressives conclude
effectively that the party is full of people of defective and unacceptable
character.
The CBC
released a story that Heritage Minister Steve Guilbeault was going to find
emergency support money for newspapers out of a general business Covid-19 wage
subsidy, in addition to a $595 million subsidy promised nearly two years
ago. Is it unjournalistic to ask whether the Federal subsidies played a
role in the editorial shilling for the Liberal government?
We do know
that Dr. Tam serves on the WHO Covid-19 committee, and that committee was
thoroughly compromised by China. That committee downplayed in
mid-February the contagiousness of the coronavirus, on the basis of China’s
official say-so. We also know that Dr. Tam claimed that ordinary people
shouldn’t use surgical masks for protection because they were ineffective, and,
besides, people might hurt themselves. This was at a time when Canada was
shipping sixteen tonnes of medical PPE to China to help them cope with the
crisis.
Is it fair
to ask whether and to what degree Dr. Tam’s race played a role in her actions
that manifestly supported official China? It is certainly worth asking
her why she did certain things when she did – if she will answer you. One
might also observe that she is turning into a shill for the Liberal party
herself.
Meanwhile,
the progressive defense of Dr. Tam by newspapers leaves them open to the charge
of being bought and paid for by the Liberal government.
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Vincent J. Curtis
25 Apr 20
Nothing
gives a frisson of satisfaction like delivering a statement of moral
certitude. “Racism is evil,” “Stigmatizing language is hurtful,” “Safety
first,” and “We must save every life we can – from Covid-19.”
The last
statement is the dominant moral certitude of the day, and is obviously silly.
We can’t disregard all the deaths that are caused by the extreme measures that
were undertaken for the sake of this certitude, as if these other deaths were
mundane, less meaningful, less important. So important it is to uphold
this certitude that a person who dies with Covid-19 is deemed to have died from
it by the health care system. Co-morbidities don’t count. We’ll
readily destroy our economy for the sake of this certitude.
One problem
with moral certitudes is that they tend to justify totalitarian measures, since
nothing that upholds the certitude can itself be wrong.
Hence, when
people protest at Queen’s Park the loss of their civil rights and jobs, Premier
Ford is moved to accuse them of being “selfish, irresponsible, reckless,
yahoos, lawbreakers, putting themselves and others in jeopardy, and they should
be better than that.” Imagine being called selfish for asserting your
civil rights and for protesting the loss of your job, but that’s what moral
certitude can do.
We know
that sunlight, warm air, and a breeze will quickly disperse and kill the
coronavirus, so young and healthy people protesting in the open air in daylight
means that, as a matter of fact, they weren’t reckless, irresponsible, or
putting themselves and others in jeopardy. But with moral certitude,
matters of facts don’t matter.
The
pandemic of fear wafting around the coronavirus created the moral certitude
that “we must save every life we can – from Covid-19,” and this in turn has
released a thrilling inner totalitarian in a lot of people. This can’t
end soon enough.
Meanwhile,
eat your vegetables – or else!
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Vincent J. Curtis
25 Apr 20
The RCMP
have released few details about the mass shooting in Nova Scotia, which tells
me there are embarrassing things they don’t want to become known too
soon. But there are some things we do know that can’t or haven’t been
hidden.
The first
is that all the gun control measures enacted in response to the École
Polytichnique shootings of 1989 utterly failed. Failed! The
shooter had no firearms permits, yet managed to acquire several long guns and
at least one handgun without them. All but one of the guns were traced to
the United States. We can be sure that no “assault-style” rifle was
involved, because if one were the Trudeau government would be making that fact
widely known. Imagine that, twenty-two people shot over a period of
thirteen hours, and no “assault-style” rifle was used.
The myth
that the police will protect you was also exploded. In rural Canada,
police are at best forty-five minutes away, so if there is an active shooter in
your rural area, you are on your own. Disarming people in rural Canada on
the grounds that you don’t need a firearm and, besides, the police will protect
you, simply won’t wash anymore.
A gun
confiscation would not have stopped the shooter because the police didn’t know
he had any to confiscate.
The gun
control regime is burdensome, even to the bureaucracy that runs it. With
a mass shooting in Canada once every thirty years or so, gun control
procedures are empty, bureaucratic exercises of no urgency or importance and
serve only to entrap the law-abiding.
The last
point is obvious to most Americans, and this is that twenty-two people died for
lack of shooting back. If gun ownership were not so heavily discouraged
in Canada, the shooter might have been startled, deterred, and even stopped by
a few flying back at him. But the shooter knew he was going after the
unarmed, and so was taking no risks.
The RCMP
found him by pure luck, and the tactical team likely gave him little time to
consider his options.
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Vincent J. Curtis
23 Apr 20
When did we
forget that the rule is the greatest good for the greatest number?
If there’s
one thing that’s forgotten in this Covid crisis, it’s that people continue to
die from other causes. In Canada, about 250,000 people are going to die
this year from all causes: cancer, heart disease, pneumonia, diabetes,
Alzheimer’s, suicide, etc. As of April 23rd, there were
roughly 40,000 known cases and 2,000 deaths from Covid-19. What we have
learned is that in most cases the person who died of coronavirus already had a
health problem.
Recent
studies in California indicate that our count of cases may be low by a factor
of fifty to eighty. The infection is so minor that most people aren’t
aware that they had it. These results, if valid, mean that the virus is
wildly more contagious than we thought, and also far less deadly. The
consequences of this is that containment measures aren’t availing, and we are
farther along the “herd immunity” curve than previously thought.
Eventually,
the extreme mitigation measures will be lifted having done little for public
health beyond delay the development of “herd immunity.” That is the fear,
that releasing people from containment will cause a new surge in cases.
Well, duh! Until half or more of the population have developed
anti-bodies for the virus, a second outbreak will almost certainly occur.
We need less containment.
Will less
containment result in more deaths? Likely, but we’re in the middle of a
pandemic, so get over it. Narcissistic moralizing and virtue-signaling
about “saving every life we can - from coronavirus” are getting in the way of sensible resolution
of the crisis. The rule is the greatest good for the greatest
number. If 10,000 people die, coronavirus might crack the top ten causes
of death in Canada this year, and maybe not if you assign the cause of death to
the morbidity the person already had before they contracted the virus. We
may get there anyway, just slowly.
It is now
becoming clear that we are destroying our economy and ruining public finances
out of a moralistic myopia. In the midst of a pandemic, you have to
expect an uptick in annual mortality. You can’t stop it. It won’t
go away until “herd immunity” is developed, hard as that is to achieve.
To get there, we have let the herd loose and have it run the minefield,
expecting thing will get ugly before they get better.
But we
can’t stay locked up where we are.
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Vincent J. Curtis
22 Apr 20
Desperate
for editorial variety in the midst of a government imposed shutdown, the
Hamilton Peoples’ Daily turned to a retirement home evacuee for a
diatribe. The old geezer wheezed and sputtered about the wickedness of
capitalism, as he has with reliable tediousness for the last fifty-five years.
Senility
hasn’t improved the product. The implication of anti-capitalism is the
new and improved version of scientific socialism, such as that practiced in
Communist China, North Korea, or Venezuela. The Wuhan virus pandemic (as
it is called in the People’s Republic, except in Mandarin), however, has made
aware even the dullest among us of the true nature of socialist paradises,
which has to make you wonder where on the evolutionary scale today’s fan-boys
of socialism really are.
An
allowance needs to be made for the innocence of childhood – even if it is a
second childhood we’re speaking of. We were assured that Canada had the
gratitude of China, but on April 20, China sent home empty two cargo aircraft
that had been dispatched from Canada to pick up needed medical supplies. Young
Justin excused the incident as a logistical mishap, but these kinds of mistakes
don’t happen by accident in communist countries.
It will be
a stick in the eye to the socialist geezers when Trumpian capitalist America
finds the cure and the vaccine for the disease released from a communist Chinese
bio-lab, just as America is conjuring a tidal wave of medical supplies
seemingly out of nowhere.
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Vincent J. Curtis
20 Apr 20
Our so-called experts continue to
demonstrate how thin and lacking in experience that expertise is. During the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918,
doctors found that open-air hospitals tended to have better outcomes. They believed it was due to the better air
circulation that rapidly dispersed harmful aerosols and to the disinfecting
action of the sun. The health benefits
of being in open air and enjoying the sunshine haven’t been repealed just
because today’s expert in epidemiology never learned about it.
It matters a great deal how many viruses a
person was initially infected with to the progress of symptoms. It matters whether the person was inoculated
with a hundred, a thousand, or a million viruses initially. A million virus inoculation can begin to
produce a health crisis before the body’s immune system can detect and respond
effectively. With a hundred or a
thousand virus inoculation, the virus must pass through several generations of
multiplication in the body to reach the million virus threshold. This time of negligible to modest health
effects gives the body’s immune system the chance to detect and respond with
the antibodies that kill the virus before a serious health crisis ensues.
Modest infection is how “herd immunity”
develops, and is why scoffing at the “laws” outside in the sunshine interacting
with other people while enjoying the pleasant breeze ought to be encouraged.
Until “herd immunity” is developed this
virus won’t be overcome, and keeping people locked indoors and the economy
shutdown prevents the development of “herd immunity.”
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Vincent J. Cutis
18 Apr 20
Much of progressivism can be summarized in
two concepts: rule by experts and the moral equivalent of war. The Covid crisis has provided the opportunity
for both.
What we have learned about rule by expert
is that you have to pick the right expert.
Each expert can be thought of as a hammer who sees the problem as his or
her nail. The Covid crisis has
introduced the expert in epidemiology, and their primary technique is the
quarantine. The voices of other medical
experts are suppressed. All other
medical procedures are suppressed for the sake of the quarantine. Stopping deaths from the epidemic take precedence
over all else, including deaths caused by the quarantine itself. Those other deaths don’t count.
Experts in economics are also suppressed,
except for contriving measures to support the quarantine. The economy can be flattened, but all
economists are needed for is to explode the Federal deficit and have the Bank
of Canada print money, all to support the quarantine.
There are examples of the moral equivalent
of war being applied by genuine non-experts, like the Governor of Michigan,
Gretchen Whitmer. She decided that
selling paint and garden seeds would undermine the quarantine, and would
therefore be banned. You can’t have
joint replacement surgery in Michigan, but you can have an abortion. So the Governor decreed. And when 10,000 people drove to the state
capital to protest from their cars these arbitrary and capricious measures, the
Governor accused them of spreading the disease.
Should her State Attorney-General and Lieutenant-Governor stage a coup d’état,
having over-ridden her State constitution, Whitmer wouldn’t have a legal case
to argue.
The Covid crisis has exposed all the weaknesses
of progressivism. First, you have to
pick the right expert. Second, the
myopia of the expert you pick can create problems that make their cure worse
than the disease. Only one expert at a
time can rule, and a non-expert needs to decide which expert holds the sceptre. The moral equivalent of war gives even charlatans
practically unlimited power – power that is not always aimed accurately at the
public good.
The progressive mind-set enabled constitutionally
protected civil rights to be destroyed easily and with impunity. The repercussions of this season-long trial
of full progressivism will be felt for a decade or more, so great were the
economic measures employed to support it.
One hopes the people have learned their
lesson, and when the cry goes up that the virus has returned, the people say, “tough!”
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