Beat Trump by keeping kids out of school

Vincent J. Curtis

11 Aug 20

Today the Spectator ran an op-ed written by Dr. Bob Berstein.  He says that he reviewed the same evidence as Toronto's famous Sick Children's hospital and came to a diametrically opposition conclusion to the experts at the hospital.  Since the provincial government is re-opening schools on the basis of the opinions of Sick Children's hospital, re-opening the schools on that basis must be dangerous and wrong.  This is not a discussion for a newspaper with an audience of medical lay-people.  The article was published to keep the scare in people  To keep the fear up, the panic going.  Yes, this article sows confusion and fear in Ontario, but to the woke crowd keeping kids out of school can only harm Trump's re-election chances.  Since Dr. Bernstein's opinion runs counter to those expressed by Dr. Scott Atlas and the AAP, I'm inclined to think Dr. Bernstein ought to think the matter over a little more.

It’s sad, really, to watch the world of Arts majors deal with the alleged pandemic.  The world of Arts majors and J-school grads lack the academic background to evaluate with a true eye the data, the science, and the credibility of those presenting themselves as experts.  Their world is one of fear, heedless of Shakespeare’s observation “Cowards die a thousand deaths, a brave man dies but once.”  Overhead, all measures are taken with an eye to defeating Donald Trump in November.

When the Spectator runs a story headlined, “Back to school plan based on flawed data” you have a case of one alleged expert calling B.S. on another alleged expert’s work and calling into question the expertise of still others who are basing policy on opinion they ought to be able to see is flawed.  The article properly belongs in a Journal, where it can be reviewed by experts; the average reader doesn’t have the expertise to evaluate the validity of Dr. Bernstein’s case.  But what they can observe is the panic.  “We’re about to do something dangerous by sending kids back to school,” is the message.

What non-experts should be noticing are inconsistencies that go unexplained.  Such as, why mask now when the pandemic is over, having peaked in mid-April?  Why was masking discouraged then but mandatory to stop the pandemic now?

Keeping up the panic and keeping the economy in chaos are thought among the woke to be keys to beating Trump.  Wrecking children’s education is a small price to pay for that, especially if they aren’t your kids.  I don’t understand why Ontario should be involved in the woke plan to beat Trump.

-30-

 

 

Indian Giving in Caledonia

Vincent J. Curtis

10 Aug 20

For the last several weeks, aboriginal protesters have been blockading a major artery in the Ontario town of Caledonia.  The Six Nations reserve in some places borders the southern boundary of the town.  To enable urban expansion, the Province of Ontario has entered into several agreements with the reserve, swapping lands and giving money to permit Caledonia's residential expansion.  As has happened before, when a dispute arises between the elected band council and hereditary chiefs, the hereditary chiefs are able to mobilize radicals to undertake peace-disturbing actions that nullify the agreement, all the while complaining about how aboriginals are being done in by the province.  And it always is the province's responsibility to deal with the protesters.  The giving of something and then the taking of it back was the legendary "Indian giving," and that expression seems to apply literally here. 

Reported by Spectator reader Al Knapp, the blockade of the McKenzie Meadows project is being organized by the hereditary chiefs of the Six Nations. They did not agree with the elected band council to the deal with the Province of Ontario.  The deal was that in exchange for a cash payment and title to land in another location, the band would surrender title of the McKenzie lands to the province.

What we see here is a classic example of Indian giving.  We saw the same thing in the dispute over the GasLink pipeline.  The band council reaches an agreement that the hereditary chiefs don’t consent to, with the result that the province is out money and land and get nothing but disputes in return.  What is the point of making deals with elected band councils if they can’t or won’t enforce their side of the bargain?

It shouldn’t be Ontario’s responsibility to clear the Aboriginal protesters, it should be the responsibility of the band.  If the band cannot, then Ontario should deduct from the cash payment the cost of enforcing the band’s side of the bargain.  Alternatively, Ontario should cancel the deal and demand from the band the full costs to date of the band’s bad faith.

If First Nations want to play the nation game, then they have to be held accountable for their side of the deal.  The internal disputes of the band isn’t our problem.

-30-

Governor-General Payette being undermined by Trudeau Goverment

Vincent J. Curtis

8 Aug 20

Governor-General Julie Payette may well be as crazy as Myriam Bedard.  The recent stories concerning the relationship she has with her staff and the expensive renovations of Rideau Hall have tended to undermine the public’s perception of her.  The fact that these stories emanate from the CBC tells you all you need to know about their political origin.

What is also true is that Governor-General Payette is at the moment the only real check on the Trudeau government.  As a result of the Covid crisis, Prime Minster Trudeau was granted practically dictatorial powers and an unlimited budget, and then the House of Commons adjourned.  The GG has the constitutional powers to dismiss a Prime Minister and to dissolve the House, and until the House gets back to normal these are the only checks on the Trudeau government.

Since Prime Minister Trudeau is presently embroiled in the WE scandal, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland was asked if, in the wake of these CBC stories,  she had confidence in Payette, to which the DPM answered. let's talk about something else.  Constitutionally, it works the other way around.  It is the GG who has to have confidence in her ministers and government, or she sends them packing.  That Freeland either didn’t know this or pretended not to know is unsettling.  To have informed the Canadian Civics-deficient Journo of the constitutional facts of Canada would have served as a perfectly good reply, but that wasn't the reply.  It makes one wonder why the Trudeau government is permitting these attacks on Payette, who, by custom, goes not engage in political combat.

Even if all that is said about Payette is true, it doesn’t matter to the us, general public.  Our democracy is highly theoretical right now, and with the House out of action, Payette is at this moment its most powerful custodian.

-30-

Are there no Adults on the School Board?

Vincent J. Curtis

5 Aug 20

As reported yesterday in the People's Daily, the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (the public school board in these parts) were accused of racism by a just-graduated student who served as a "student-trustee" on the Board in her last year.  The girl is a Muslim immigrant, which makes the whole thing especially weird.  She said she spent 14 years in the school system, and graduated from Grade 12 in June.  Let's be kind and assume two of those years were pre-K and Kindergarten.

The amazing thing is that this affair started with some tweets late last week, and by Tuesday, she's holding a press conference in front of the school board building.  The Board, knowing what was coming, announced an investigation as soon as the girl stopped talking.  Apparently, saying that the girl was a stupid, immature brat who doesn't know what she's talking about, apparently never occurred to anyone at the Board.  They know how the woke game is played, and decided to play by those rules.

Anyhow, it looks quite undignified for all thee adults to bow down and react in the approved manner upon the mere accusation of a disgruntled teenager making accusations without proof; indeed are unfalsifiable since so many of them are personal impressions while others occurred without wintesses.

How many times have we seen this movie before?  A kid who knows nothing, and whose head has been stuffed with woke ideas, accuses an institution of racism, and the institution collapses before it.

The irony is delicious.  The accused institution is perhaps the most woke in the city, the Public School Board.  The woke are eating their own.

Are there no adults at the School Board? They were accused of “patronizing” a teenager, a student “trustee.”  She accused Board management of being ‘racialized,” of subjecting her to “microaggressions,” and engaging in “racial gaslighting.”  She claims she heard real trustee, an elected official, of referring to a famous black athlete by “the N-word.”

Of all these accusations, only the last has any objective reality.  The rest are the accuser’s personal perceptions and opinions, which obviously went unvoiced at the time of their alleged occurrences.

So, where are the adults?  Why isn’t their one to call B.S. on these accusations?  To state flatly they’re wrong.  To demand evidence.

It’s no wonder the student trustee felt patronized – she’s a kid who’s in over her head and dealing with business affairs for which she has no experience.

The response of the Board is obvious.  They’re playing pantomime too.  The Board knows how the woke accusation game is played, and their outside investigation is a deflection tactic.

Unfortunately, the pantomime lends credence to the falsehoods the woke are trying to foist on public policy.

This game does all of us harm.

-30-

Myths of Black History in Canada Dispelled

Vincent J. Curtis

1 Aug 20

The BLM movement in Canada is trying to foist a false history of the presents of Blacks in Canada.  The two most important seem to be that Blacks have been in Canada for 400 years, and that slavery was not abolished in Canada until 1 August 1834.  Let's dispel those myths as they were expressed in an article on the subject that was published in the People's Daily this date.

First off, "Canada" in any form did not come into existence until 1791.  Prior to that, the legal entity that existed within the geographical limits of present day Canada was the French colony of New France, which was conquered by the British in 1759 during the Seven Years War.  So, there is a conceptual problem with Canada even existing for 400 years.  The second claim, of 400 years' presents rests on the record of one Mathieu da Costa having been employed as a translator by Samuel de Champlain, the founder of New France.  The records show that da Costa worked for about three years in the colony, but did not settle in it.  He returned to France about 1617, and sued in a French court for unpaid wages and expenses.  The fact that he had standing to sue in a French court at that time would indicate that he didn't look particularly African.  In fact, da Costa is described of being of Portuguese-African descent.  "African" is a pretty broad tern, and Moroccan is just as African as Nigerian is.  So, the claim that blacks have been in Canada for 400 years is straight up false on the basis of this one tenuous case not settling in New France. 

Slavery really didn't exist in Canada at all.  When United Empire Loyalists came to Upper Canada after the American Revolution, some brought slaves with them.  There were said to be some 16 in the town of York (present day Toronto) in 1793.  The new legislature abolished slave holding in Upper Canada by a combination of immediate freedom for new entries and by purchasing the freedom of the few already here.  The burden of raising child slaves to adulthood was placed on slave holders.  They simply couldn't cut them loose and expect them to make it on their own.  They had to raise the children they "owned."  Property rights were seen differently then than now; the government simply couldn't take property without compensation.  Lower Canada never dealt with the issue, so far as I am aware, because slaves simply didn't exist in New France/Lower Canada, so there was no reason to.  The French dealt with Indians, not slaves.

The article contains a number of half-truths and falsehoods that are commonly passed as a revisionist history.  The assertions are: that blacks have been in Canada for four hundred years, and that slavery was abolished in Canada on August 1st, 1834.

Four hundred years ago, 1620, the colony of New France existed around present-day Quebec City.  It consisted of subsidence farmers and fur traders.  This system of economics did not support slavery, and no slavery or blacks existed in New France up to the time of the conquest in 1759.  The person Mathieu da Costa, mentioned in the article, was a mixed race Portuguese-African who worked for a couple of years in New France but did not settle there.  He had standing to sue for unpaid expenses in a French court in 1617, which may say something about his racial composition.

The legal entity called Canada was first organized by Britain with the passage of the Constitution Act, 1791.  As mentioned in the article, Upper Canada abolished slavery in 1793, by a process the author obviously didn’t understand.  Hence, slavery may have been abolished in the British Empire in 1834, and Canada was then a part of the British Empire, but slavery was actually abolished in Canada in 1793.  It never existed in Lower Canada, and so no action was ever taken, or needed, by the legislature of Lower Canada.

Revisionist history in the service of today’s racial politics does us no good.

-30-

Naval Gazing

Vincent J. Curtis

2 June 20

Why does Canada even have a navy?  We’re going to spend $62 billion (allegedly) to replace the one we have, so before we break the bank, let’s understand why.  When the RCN lost its replenishment vessels, it was downgraded to an “offshore regional coastal defense force” from a “multiregional power projection force,” so we mustn’t forget replenishment in the strategic picture.

The RCN came into its own during the Secord World War.  By 1945, Canada boasted the fifth largest navy in the world, floating over 1,100 boats.  Canada possessed two aircraft carriers and two light cruisers.  The most famous craft were the Tribal class destroyers and the corvettes.  The RCN was designed for convoy escort, of which anti-submarine warfare is the central component.  The Tribals proved useful also in the English Channel against German E-boat raiders.

The RCN was put back into water after the heating up of the Cold War and the outbreak of the Korean War.   Canada acquired the HMCS Bonaventure, a light aircraft carrier, and equipped her with McDonnell F2H Banshee jet fighters and Grumman Tracker ASW aircraft.  The navy also recommissioned WWII vessels.  The Bonaventure was scrapped in 1970, and Canada acquired four Iroquois class ASW destroyers (since retired) and the Halifax class patrol frigates, which were useful in ASW and anti-piracy patrols.  These are coming to the end of their useful lives and are scheduled to be replaced with fifteen Type 26 frigate, at a cost of $4 billion each.

The choice of fifteen of the same type indicates a lack of imagination and a lack of vision.  Navy brass doesn’t seem to have a particular purpose in mind for a fleet of slow frigates.  The Type 26 was designed as an ASW escort vessel for the new Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers of the Royal Navy.  These fleet carriers are conventionally powered and hence seem intended for operations in the North Atlantic.  The Type 26 will be equipped for the ASW role and can provide close-in air defence for the carriers.

But why the Type 26 for Canada?  The Type 26 is slow and expensive.  Why spend $4 billion on a 7,000 ton frigate when for only $2 billion (U.S.) you can have a 10,000 ton Arleigh Burke class missile destroyer?  The top speed of the Type 26 is 26 knots, while that of an Arleigh Burke is 35 knots.  An Aleigh Burke is configurable for ASW as well as long range strike, as the Type 26 will be.  Bigger, faster, cheaper.

Strategic realities are that the naval service is the only one Canada has that can deliver a strategic strike anywhere in the world independent of any other power.

Former CDS General Rick Hillier said that Canada needed a “big honkin’ ship.”   So, why not build ten of the Type 26, and invest five frigates worth of cash into a big honkin’ ship?  A 15,000 ton displacement heavy cruiser would have all the deck space needed to deliver a multiplicity of heavy blows, and would form the core of an honest-to-god Canadian naval task force.

Modern naval warfare is designed around missile technology.  A modern naval battle would take place with opposing ships out of sight of each other, with helicopters and radars providing target acquisition.  Missiles would be used to attack opposing ships and defend against incoming missiles.  But there is a gap in naval capability that used to be filled by the battleship, now derided as obsolete.

Battleships captivated the imagination because of the majestic power they obviously disposed in their massive guns.  Diplomacy in peacetime occurred when battleships sailed.  Allied battleships in WWII used their heavy guns primarily to support landing operations.  Long barrelled, heavy guns are still intimidating and, with modern artillery guidance technology, still capable, and would be a versatile weapons system on a ship big enough to carry them.

A hybrid of heavy cruiser and missile cruiser could form the core of a uniquely Canadian naval task force.

-30-.

The Futility of Masking

Vincent J. Curtis

1 Aug 20

Masking is futile in the midst of the pandemic.  Masking has, however, become a sign of favorable social control by the progressive left, and is accepted by most others - if it provides relief from the oppression of the lockdown.  People want their freedom back, and will mask-up as the price they have to pay to get it.  Surgical masks, however, provide a false sense of security.

There is an upsurge in “cases” since the middle of June both in Canada and in the United States.  This time frame coincides with the incubation period since the first of the George Floyd demonstrations and riots.  Many, if not most, of the demonstrators were masked, and yet spreading occurred – because masking is largely ineffective against transmission of the virus.  Masking with surgical masks and home-brew affairs provide a false sense of security.

Surgical masks are limited in usefulness to when the person wearing it is contagious.  Obviously, if a person is not contagious, the mask wearer has no virus to transmit.  Surgical masks and worse are not effective as dust masks, and it as a kind of dust that the virus is picked up.   Remember the run on N95 masks?  These are respirator-masks that are designed to block the inhalation of dust.  A healthy person wants to block the uptake of dust, and can safely exhale his own, virus-free breath.  The surgical mask blocks the outflow of mist in the breath, and so is suitable for an infected person to wear.

With social distancing of 1 meter or more, mask wearing is reduced to uselessness because an infected person can’t push the mist in their breath farther than 1 m.  With reasonable air circulation, that virus mass that is pushed into the atmosphere is diluted and dispersed.

Large crowds yelling and chanting and not social distancing can challenge the atmosphere’s ability to dilute and disperse airborne virus instantly.  Since surgical masks are not protection against dust, mask-wearing demonstrators only protected their identity, not their health, by wearing them.  Surgical masks gave a false sense of security – against infection.

It is amusing to watch the famous Dr. Fauci break all his own rules on masking: taking it off, putting it back on, fussing with it in his hands, etc.  These things destroy whatever protection a cloth mask can provide from infection.  He once warned against all these things, and he is fast becoming a farce of his old self.

There aren’t enough NIOSH approved respirator masks for everybody, and surgical masks are no substitute.  Luckily, social distancing is quite adequate most of the time, even in the presence of a contagious person.  Surgical masks are suitable for contagious persons to wear in the presence of others, preferably also with good air exchange that dilutes and removes any concentration of virus.  The problem of infection arises when one is trapped in the presence of a concentrated amount of air-borne virus, as can occur in a closed room with poor air exchange.  In this case, a surgical mask only provides a false sense of security.

Surgical masks will continue to be signs of compliance.  They are not a sign of protection, they look ridiculous, and almost always are ridiculous.

-30-