Passport realism: You think a phone app will save your life?

Vincent J. Curtis

31 Aug 21

As one of the few Aristotelian-Thomist-Scholastic Realists who still read the Spectator, I find it alarming how many people believe that a cell phone app will protect them from the virus.  You only have to say that it’s the vaccination that protects you, not the app, to realize that it’s true.

A vaccine passport only works when a certain range of the population is vaccinated.  If vaccination rates are very high, the passport becomes a useless encumbrance.  Too low, and it’s impractical to exclude and fire that many people.  The passport is simply a means of coercing people to get vaccinated by making their lives unpleasant, but there are no studies showing that passports change the spread of the virus or alter the course of a pandemic.

Passports do not protect you from the unvaccinated.  In the first place, it is the vaccination that protects a person from the virus; and second, practically all unvaccinated people are not contagious anyhow.  So why the social stigma?  You’re back to killing flies with a hammer again.

About 570,000 Ontarians have been “cases.”  This means it would take over twenty six years to infect everyone alive in Ontario today, absent any other intervention.  Even in this fourth wave, it is statistically unlikely that you’ll encounter a contagious person, from whom you are protected by your vaccination.  So, why are we creating a leper class?  Dividing people into classes is Marxian in character.

Maybe an unvaccinated owner will start excluding passport holders from his establishment.  That would be funny.

Beware of passports.  Once a government program gets started, it is hard to stop – even well after it is useless.

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Marxism marches through vaccine passports

Vincent J. Curtis

30 Aug 21

RE: letters to the editor of Monday, August 30^th

I can’t get over just how bad the letters to the editor were on Monday.  We have Diana MacKenzie saying we must get over notions of freedom and individual rights and realize that, in a pandemic, society as a whole should be the important thing.  What ant colony does MacKenzie belong to?  We have society because it benefits the individuals who belong to it.  There is no reason to belong otherwise.

Some climate crazies believe the earth holds 5 billion too many humans.  If ordered to get into line for the ovens, is she going to shut up and obey, or look to escape?

Ed Walzak wrote about a hundred year old family tragedy that happened because of the Spanish flu.  He also deprecates freedom, believing we have too many, among which include bodily integrity, the right to say no, and the right to make one’s own medical decisions.  The right to abortion rests on “my body, my choice.”  We have MAID because of our right to life written in the Charter.  Let me run Ed’s life for a while, and we’ll see just how committed he is to rule by the idiots.

Johanna de Bruin cleverly thinks it unchristian that Redeemer permits the exercise of God-given free will in respect of vaccination.  Redeemer understands what vaccination does, while Johanna does not.

Bill Sullivan thinks vaccine passports protect society.  No they don’t.  Vaccinated people are protected by their vaccinations from the disease, not by the passport, and not from unvaccinated people.  Unvaccinated people are taking their chances, as they have a right to do.  I have never laid eyes on a society before, only individual people.

Al Knapp believes that vaccine passports protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated.  No, they don’t.  The vaccination protects the vaccinated from the disease, not the passport, and not from unvaccinated people.  That asymptomatic person next to you won’t infect you if you’re vaccinated, and perhaps even if they’re coughing and sneezing.  If you don’t want to associate with the unvaccinated, then perhaps we should make them wear a yellow star, or something.  You can sit at another table.  Also, Justin Trudeau doesn’t have the authority to mandate universal vaccinations.  How could he enforce it – at gunpoint?

I despair of our education system that could produce such arrant ideas of human rights.  Marxism is inherent in all the views criticized above.

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Trudeau’s campaign aircraft

 

Vincent J. Curtis

30 Aug 21

RE: Experts say Liberals in Atlantic Canada unfocussed, lack “coherent message.” A story by Michael Macdonald of the Canadian Press published in the Hamilton Spectator 30 Aug 21 along with a picture.  The picture is of Justin Trudeau turning and waving to unseen supporters just before he enters his campaign aircraft.  Photo credit goes to Sean Kilpatrick, The Canadian Press file photo.

Did you notice the size of the engine of the Trudeau 2021/Liberal campaign aircraft?  That isn’t some 7 passenger Gulfstream our hirsute hero is boarding, it’s a carbon belching behemoth suitable for Air Canada.  Trudeau uses this carbon belcher to fly around the country to tell us about the dangers of climate change and the sufferings he’s going to impose on us to make it go away.

Trudeau is evidently exempt from the ramifications of his climate change ideology.  He’s too important and the message is too important to subject him to some low carbon alternative.  Besides, his carbon belcher’s contribution to world CO2 emission is so miniscule, that it doesn’t matter.

But what does seem to matter is Canada’s miniscule contribution to world CO2 emissions, currently 1.5 percent of world total, and falling.  China’s contribution is 30 percent and rising, but that’s okay.  Canadian sacrifice can make room for China’s growth.  But we mustn’t talk about that, only about the evils Canadians do and the sacrifices they must endure to make amends.

Although Mr. Trudeau is waving and striking a heroic pose, no one else is in the picture, indicating the size of the crowd seeing him off.  Oh, there’s likely ground crew and a few staffers and local candidates, a small group too embarrassing to show.

Perhaps on election day, everyone will discover just how alone our national hero really is.

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Vaccine Passports: systemic racism & admission of vaccine failure

Vincent J. Curtis

28 Aug 21

Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war.

                                                Star Trek VI (oh, and Julius Caesar Act III Scene 1)

Ever since the beginning of the pandemic, bureaucratic Bonaparts have been exerting powers and giving commands they have no authority or right to exercise or give.  But, stunned by the cry of “Havoc!” people everywhere have surrendered their rights and even their good senses.  It is particularly obnoxious that people with guns, who are trained to know better, enforce these unlawful and unconstitutional orders.

Vaccine passports are the latest craze in illegal and unconstitutional restrictions on people’s movement.  Vaccine passports guarantee nothing.  There is no proof whatsoever that they limit the spread of the virus.  They are popular because they are seen as means of coercing the unvaccinated into get vaccinated, even those who have already recovered from the disease.  They are yet another example of making some people feel better by worthless activity and restrictions on others.

It is well known that racial minorities lag in vaccination behind the general population.  Consequently, vaccine passports have a disparate impact on racial minorities.  By any previous measure, vaccine passports amount to systemic racism!

A passport, as we now know, is no guarantee because vaccination is no guarantee  An unvaccinated person who is not contagious is no threat to anyone, particularly not to a vaccinated person.  The whole point of vaccination is to protect from the disease, hence a vaccinated person is supposedly protected from whatever the unvaccinated might be carrying.  That is, unless, it is being admitted that the vaccines aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

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What’s wrong with this picture?

Vincent J. Curtis

27 Aug 21

RE: Ontario health units explore regional immunization certificates.

If you want to know why young people distrust vaccines, you only have took at the picture of Debra Lefevbre, of the Ontario Nurses Association of Ontario on page A10, of today’s Spectator.  She’s a compliance fanatic not current with the science.

She is masked, outdoors, and waving around a proposed vaccine passport, because the province refuses to sanction them.  Presumably, she’s vaccinated, and looks much younger than eighty years of age.  How many levels of redundancy are necessary to be protected from the virus?  Does she understands the science?

Transmission of the virus outdoors is almost unheard of.  The University of Waterloo engineering department recently released a study confirming what many knew, that cloth and paper masks are virtually useless, capturing ten percent - at best - of airborne particles the size of viruses.  Vaccinated or not, Nurse Lefevbre is extremely unlikely to catch the virus in the setting pictured.  Being young, the severity of an infection would be low anyhow, and she is vaccinated.  So, what’s with the mask?  Compliance! “Shut-up and obey!”

The ONA needs to get off its soap-box and trying to run the province on the strength of their superior wisdom and morality.  Nobody elected them.  It’s obvious they’re compliance fanatics who aren’t current with the science.

Not wise, nor superior in knowledge or morality.

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Paikin Miller shows pluck

Vincent J. Curtis

26 Aug 21

RE: Trustee’s response to racism probe revealed.  News item in the Hamilton Spectator by Katrina Clarke.

You have to admire Trustee Carole Paikin Miller’s pluck.  Beset on all sides by idiots, she refuses to yield.  When confronted with an idiotic pile of crap as proof of her evil, she patiently showed that it was crap.

All the characters in the drama are women, and the drama shows that women can be stupid and petty.  Take the lawyer who wrote the report.  She deemed it “more probable than not” that Paikin Miller expressed unprogressive sentiments, that she demonstrated a “blatant disregard” for those precious equity issues, and most damning of all made observations on the relative proportion of anti-Black to anti-Semitic and Islamophobic focuses that “are in themselves racist and offensive.”  Who is this lawyer to inject her own sentiments and opinions in a fact-finding report?

Ahona Medhi was the 18 year old complainant, a Gen-Z something who absorbed the ennui of the moment and took offense when no one paid attention to her high opinion on matters of importance to her.  The states of geography and history instruction in Hamilton schools were not her concerns.

The clueless Kojo Damptey was invited to weigh in, and demonstrated he knows nothing specific about the matter.  Likewise, Professor Ameil Jospeh gave boilerplate answers about racism in general.  Funny how no one is concerned about grades or curriculum but they’re all in on “equity.”

The mad-house is run by the inmates, and Paikin Miller is one of the old guard under siege.

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Immigration and climate change

Vincent J. Curtis

25 Aug 21

The reference to Wayne Poole is to a letter of his published in today's Hamilton Spectator.

When Wayne Poole of Dundas says, in respect of fighting climate change, “…we have no choice but to fight.  It doesn’t help that we have to fight against ignorance and stupidity.” he doesn’t know the half of it.

Take Canada’s carbon footprint.  It’s the accumulation of the all the little climate footprints of individual Canadians.  The more Canadians, the bigger the Canadian footprint.  So why are we adding to the problem of reducing the size of the Canadian carbon footprint by adding more Canadians via immigration?  If you’re concerned about climate change and Canada’s contribution to it, you have no choice but to be opposed to immigration.  Who says ‘A’ must say ‘B’.

It is particularly stupid to take immigrants from underdeveloped or tropical countries.  People from these countries have small carbon footprints compared to Canadians, either because of lack of development or they don’t need to heat their homes in winter.  Moving people from low carbon footprint countries to Canada increases the size of the world carbon footprint, besides making Canada’s problem more difficult.

Likewise, it is stupid and ignorant to move Canadian primary steel manufacturing to India or China.  Canadian steelmakers are among the most efficient in the world, and make a ton of steel with half the coal that Chinese makers do.  Taking Canadian primary steel making off-line simply creates more room in the market for inefficiently made steel produced with twice the CO2.  Yet taking Canadian primary steel making off-line is precisely what is being celebrated by those supposedly most concerned with climate change.  Ignorant and stupid, indeed!

Who says ‘A’ must also say ‘B’.

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