Quarantining test negative people is irrational and illegal

Vincent J. Curtis

31 Jan 21

RE: New Travel Rules should come as no surprise.  Spectator editorial of 20 Jan 21.

It can drive real scientists around the bend when people with power pretend to be scientists too.  Take for example a well-known drama teacher who decided to kill as much joy as possible and ordered the quarantining of anyone returning to Canada from the sunny Caribbean.

As the Spec editorial described it, upon return by a person is subjected to a rapid COVID test at the airport.  If that person tests negative, they head home to finish their quarantine.  What?  Wait a minute!  They tested negative, they don’t have the disease!!  Quarantines are for people that you don’t know are positive or negative, and the purpose of quarantine is to give time for symptoms to develop or for the disease to run its course.  Quarantining people known to by healthy is not just irrational, it’s illegal under the Quarantine Act.

If the person upon return tests positive, they will be taken to a hotel for isolation.  There are several such hotels in the Toronto area, and the incarcerated are not presently forced to pay for the stay because holding them there is illegal.  Forcing people to pay to be kept unlawfully incarcerated is also illegal.  What are authorities going to do if an inmate calls a cab and simply leaves the premises – arrest them and send them to jail?

Forcing returning Canadians to be tested intrusively at the airport is illegal.  Quarantining people who test negative is irrational and illegal, and forcible confinement of test-positive people is also illegal.  Don’t drag the good name of science into this!

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Why Canada should not choose an Indigenous Governor General

Vincent J. Curtis

29 Jan 21

Selecting an Indigenous for Governor General would be counter-productive to the aim of gaining “reconciliation” with the Indigenous peoples of Canada.  It might make guilt-ridden Anglos feel better about themselves, but any such selection would be rejected by the main stream of the Indigenous people.  The individual would be seen either as a lucky opportunist, or a sell-out.

In the first place, Indigenous people do not regard themselves as Canadian.  They are First Nations, not Canadian.  They regard themselves as sovereign, and distinct from Canada.  They were never classified as British subjects, naturally; and are only Canadian citizens by virtue of the Citizenship Act of 1947 and to the Indian Act of 1951.  They would regard any attempt to make them more like run-of-the-mill Canadian as simply another attempt to extinguish their separate identity and to absorb them into general Canadian society, as was and is one of the aims of the Indian Act since 1876.

The Americans thought that electing Barack Obama president of the United States would end the historical issues of slavery and racism in that country, but it actually made the problem of racism much worse.  Identity politics is tearing America apart, and indulging identity politics in Canada will have similar effect.

The Governor General represents the Queen in Canada.  It would awkward for a beneficiary of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 to represent the monarchy to those charged with upholding that proclamation.

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Mattress Girl’s Revenge

Vincent J. Curtis

28 Jan 21

RE: Province aims to ban probes into student’s sexual pasts.  Hamilton Spectator 28 Jan 21

When you cut through the bafflegab in the story, what is clear is that women’s groups are fighting for the power to destroy men they don’t like.  These men may be cads, but they aren’t criminals.

The give-away is a seemingly minor difference in terminology.  McMaster University has a policy on sexual violence, but the Associate Minister of Children’s and Women’s Issues said the government has zero tolerance for sexual assault.  The difference is that sexual assault is a crime, but sexual violence is an administrative matter under the purview of the university.  The criminal justice system has well developed procedures for investigating and prosecuting sexual assault.  But the university has far less experience in dealing with sexual violence, and the action proposed by the provincial government is a ham-fisted attempt to import “rape-shield” protections of criminal procedures into university administrative policies.

The key change is that the plaintiff, or “survivor” as they are called – note the change in presumption of innocence – cannot be sanctioned for violating the university’s drug and alcohol policy if she admit to violating it in the course of her complaint.  In other words, if mattress girl was drunk or high on drugs and had sex with a guy who was also drunk or high and she later regretted the encounter, she can complain, but his impairment is no defense.

Ontario universities aren’t as wicked on due process as American universities are, but this change gets them closer.

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John Kerry makes Canadian climate efforts hopeless

Vincent J. Curtis

28 Jan 21

At a news conference on January 27, John Kerry, the Biden Administration’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, observed that ninety percent of the world’s CO2 emissions occurred outside United States borders.  He then said that if the United States emissions “went to zero tomorrow”, the problem of the existential threat wouldn’t be solved 

This same argument applies with ten times the force to Canada.  Ninety-eight and a half percent of the world’s CO2 emissions occur outside Canadian borders, and if Canadian emissions went to zero tomorrow, the problem – the existential threat – wouldn’t be solved, or even touched.

Kerry’s remarks came as a shock.  Kerry was trying to justify the Biden Administration rejoining the Paris Accord and starting other initiatives to reduce world CO2 emissions.  But what people heard was that the United States wasn’t the Great Satan of climate catastrophe that they had been told, and they heard it from the lips of one who had intimated that it was.  This candid observation threw into doubt in the minds of many the practicality of self-flagellation over climate.  Unless China and India get on board, painful actions to reduce emissions in America will be fruitless.

The same applies to Canada even more.  Mr. Trudeau’s policies on climate will be utterly futile to the larger problem even if they works perfectly at home.  They will amount to demonstrations of moral vanity to our detriment rather that effective solutions.

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I wouldn’t want a professor like that!

Vincent J. Curtis

27 Jan 21

RE: I wouldn’t want a policy like that.  Hamilton Spectator of today.

The Spectator was finally forthcoming with an article explaining in objective detail its issues with McMaster and the university’s sexual “violence” policy.  It’s quite clear that the object of the policy during the consultation phase was to engage in the most extreme of cancel culture utterly without reference to the principles of fundamental justice.

So far as wokeness goes, the intended policy as pronounced by Professor Dean was weird, because it presumed a male-female gender binary.  The received woke position is that gender is a subjective mental construction without basis in objective reality.  In short, to the truly woke, male on female violence is incoherent since neither gender truly exists.

Regardless, Professor Amber Dean says if she were assaulted on campus, she’d go to the police rather than the university to investigate.  Well, duh!  Criminal matters are police matters, not matters of university administration.  And this is where the principles of justice and the common law come in, to the inconvenience of vicious fanatics like the good professor of cultural studies.  Dean obviously wants a presumption of guilt placed upon the accused.

But then, the university lawyers got involved, and their interest was protection of the university.  Dean complains that the recommended policy got changed into something color-blind and neutral in perspective, and providing no assurance the university would deal with equity issues.  The lawyers drafted something that wouldn’t get the university sued for millions.  As for equity issues, they don’t exist on a university campus.  Everyone’s presence at university is a sign of privilege, especially the foreign students whose families back home can afford the full freight of tuition.

When Dean complains that McMaster “survivors” are rarely told what “their perpetrators” face or have faced, it’s obvious that Dean wants “survivors” to enjoy the grim satisfaction of watching the accused tormented and punished by the agents of the university.  “Survivors” can’t appeal the outcome of an investigation nor the sanctions imposed.  Is this what has become of feminism today, a branch of sadism?  Justice is determined by neutral judges and juries, not enraged accusers.  But Dean isn’t interested in justice.  She wants revenge.

Professor Dean is a sad case of hatred and failed woke progressivism.  I wouldn’t want to be one of her students, because she would surely assign a failing grade to someone in her power who didn’t espouse the orthodoxy she preached.

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Time to End House Arrest?

Vincent J. Curtis

26 Jan 21 

The second wave of COVID has crested and the decline has begun.  And it isn’t a slow decline.  It’s time for Premier Ford to declare victory and get his boot off the neck of Ontarians.

Ford put Ontario into a four week “temporary, one-time” shutdown beginning December 26, when daily case numbers were starting to exceed 2000 per day.  As forecasted here, the shutdown would see a sharp rise in case numbers, followed by a sharp drop off as the fire created by the shutdown ran out of fuel.  On January 26, Ontario had several days in a row of sub-2000 case numbers, and the graph of case numbers clearly show a peak.

On January 12, Ford made a liar of himself by announcing a thirty day period of house arrest for the province.  The “knock your socks off” modelling by his luckless medical advisers showed as many as 20,000 cases per day by February 14^th.  The model was obsolete before it was presented as case numbers began dropping the weekend before the announcement of provincial house arrest on the basis of the modelling.  This was the second time the modellers were completely wrong, the first being November 12 when they forecasted 6500 cases per day by December 15, and were off by a factor of three.

Ontario no longer publishes hospitalization, ICU and “on ventilator” statistics, which means those numbers are embarrassing to the modellers, and explodes the case for the shutdown and house arrest.

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Trudeau owes Biden a favor?

Vincent J. Curtis

25 Jan 21

What kind of moron says that Trudeau owes Joe Biden a favor because Biden shafted Alberta?  One who doesn’t do his research, or have any sense of proportion, it turns out.  For starters, Geoffrey Stevens, who declared this because Biden cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline,  forgot about the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion that will carry Alberta crude to Vancouver, and from there to China.  So much for saving the world from Alberta’s crude oil.

To think this character is teaching the next generation of journalist, and the current crop is none too good!

Stevens would make a liar of Trudeau, officially, since Trudeau did say he would fight for the pipeline, (but not too hard).  As for meeting Paris Accord requirements, the U.S. is the only country that bettered its Paris Accord targets, thanks to the use of natural gas derived from Trump-supported fracking.  Stevens should have done his research on this, and on this item: that Canada only produces 1.5 percent of world CO2 emissions.  Devastating Alberta’s economy to reduce that figure to 1.0 percent is futile for world CO2 emissions and fatal to Canada ever getting to a balanced budget in a reasonable way, and harmful to Canada’s balance of trade with the U.S.

Green technology? Spare me!  Look at brown-out California if you want the best possible scenario for the success of green technology.  They only work if you have a nat gas generating station waiting on line for the inevitable failures of wind and solar.

The guy who won from the Keystone cancellation was Warren Buffet, owner of railroads.  I think Biden was returning a favor to Buffet and not thinking of Justin at all.

The only satisfaction Trudeau got out of Biden’s decision is that the province that won’t return a single Liberal ever got royally screwed.  Stevens needs to lay off the Klimate Krazy Kool-Aid.

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