Derek Sloan Asked the Right Question!

Derek Sloan, the Member of Parliament for the constituency of Hastings - Lennox and Addington in Upper Canada, has gotten the panties of the press prostitutes all twisted into a knot. Arming themselves with the print and cyber, verbal equivalents of torches and pitchforks, they have formed a lynch mob and demanded that Andrew Scheer, the Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, which is Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition in the present Parliament, hand him over to them.

His offence was to tweet out a video asking a very valid question about Dr. Theresa Tam, the Dominion's Chief Public Health Officer. The question was one of whom does she serve, Her Majesty's free Dominion of Canada or the Communist regime of Red China. Those who are howling for his head say that this is racist.

Yet, they themselves are the ones focusing on Dr. Tam's race, ethnicity and skin colour.

That Mr. Sloan's question is not a racist one can be easily demonstrated by the fact that the very same question can be legitimately asked of the Prime Minister, Captain Airhead, or, as some like to call him, Justin Trudeau. About seven years ago, he was caught on tape blithering on like the idiot he is, about how he much he admired the "basic dictatorship" of Red China, in response to a question about what country he admired the most. His father, who had been head of a delegation of Canadian Communists invited to a summit in the Soviet Union back in the days of Stalin, was noted for expressing similar sentiments. He gushed and fawned over the Chinese dictatorship at a time when Mao Tse-Tung himself was still dictator. Would it be racist to ask of Captain Airhead if he is serving Red China rather than Canada?

"That's different", the lynch mob will scream.

Why is it different?

The only discernible difference is that Captain Airhead is lily white, with a French last name, and is descended from French and English Canadian stock. Dr. Tam is of Asian race and Chinese ethnicity. She was born in Hong Kong, however, when it was still a Dependant Territory of the United Kingdom and she was raised in the UK. This is not a background likely to result in allegiance to the Communist regime in Beijing.

"That's our point exactly", I can hear the blood-thirsty anti-Sloan gang, crying.

Yes, but you are missing mine.

The reason the question with regards to Dr. Tam is valid, is not because of her race and ethnicity, but because of her connection to the World Health Organization. The WHO is led by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who previous to his current gig, was a high-ranking official in a murderous, genocidal, ethno-Communist regime in Ethiopia in the crimes against humanity of which he was fully participant, and who owes his new position to the Chinese regime. From the very beginning of this coronavirus outbreak the WHO has been acting as if it were the official propaganda organ of the Communist Party of China. At first, when China was downplaying the severity of the outbreak in Wuhan, and silencing those who tried to speak out, the WHO simply repeated what the Chinese government was telling them. Then, when they sealed off Hubei province from the rest of China and world leaders such as Donald Trump in the United States began to take notice of what was going on, the WHO ridiculed the idea that travel in and out of China might not be safe and should be restricted. Dr. Tam, who has been a member of multiple WHO committees and who was named Canada's Chief Public Health Officer two weeks minus one day before Tedros Adhanom took over the WHO is part of the WHO's oversight committee on health emergencies like this one. She is a member of the committee that recommended against travel restrictions. She told Canadians at the time that we were at low risk from this disease. Finally, when the virus had spread around the globe and the WHO declared a pandemic, it advised its member nations to follow Red China's example in containing the virus, by imposing essentially Communist restrictions on movement, association, and assembly on their entire populations. The countries that ignored the WHO's advice every step of the way are the countries that have handled the pandemic the best.. Multiple governments around the world are now demanding an investigation into the WHOs behaviour. The Communist regime in China is "firmly opposed" to such an independent review. Note that the countries that ignored the WHO from the beginning of the COVID-19 panic were for the most part the countries that were hit the hardest by the first SARS outbreak in 2002-2005. The Kingdom of Sweden which had only five cases and no deaths from the original SARS is an exception. The Dominion of Canada is the exception in the other direction. We had the most cases of SARS and deaths from SARS of any non-Asian country. Yet, unlike Taiwan and Singapore, we have been slavishly obeying every dictate of the WHO. It is entirely reasonable to think that our Chief Public Health Officer's being on the committee that decides WHO recommendations might be the reason for that. This very weekend she has been regurgitating the WHO's warnings against relying on "herd immunity" despite that strategy's having worked for Sweden, and a lot better than the WHO strategy has been working elsewhere.

Derek Sloan's question is both valid and appropriate.

Captain Airhead was quoted by the Globe and Mail as saying that Mr. Sloan's remarks "have no place in our country."

On the contrary, it is Captain Airhead's totalitarian attitude - that those who think differently from him on matters such as these have no place here - that truly does not belong in Canada, or any other free Commonwealth realm. He should take his crummy attitude somewhere where it does belong. Like Communist China for example.

Only Morons Try to Flatten Curves

Straightenin' the curves
Flattenin' the hills
Some day the mountain might get 'em
but the law never will.

- Waylon Jennings as "The Balladeer" in the theme song to the Dukes of Hazzard. This quote has absolutely nothing to do with what I am discussing in this essay and is thrown in merely for my amusement.

In most – not all – countries, public health authorities have responded to the Wuhan Flu pandemic by issuing “shelter in place” or “stay at home” orders to the entire population, closing public facilities, shutting down all businesses and services that they declare to be “non-essential” and requiring that people stay at least six feet from each other when they must go out to buy groceries, get medical attention or the like. The end to which these are the means is expressed in that ubiquitous phrase, one of many that I wish never to hear again in my life after this pandemic is over, “flattening the curve.”

The curve that they are trying to flatten is that of the graph indicating the projected pattern of numbers of persons infected with COVID-19 from when the coronavirus first enters a population – or at least when it is first detected there – to when the pandemic peters out and ends. As is usual for an epidemic/pandemic the numbers infected are small at the beginning, then as it begins to spread faster they rise, at some point reaching a peak, before dropping back down again. Plotted on a graph, it forms the familiar bell shaped curve that statisticians use to represent a normal distribution in probability theory.

To “flatten the curve” means to alter the pattern by slowing down the spread of the virus so that the peak is much lower. This does not necessarily mean that the total number of people infected will be any less – just that the largest number of people who will be infected at the same time will be less. The point of doing this, is to prevent the medical system from being overburdened all at once and collapsing.

It should be observed that this strategy is designed to save the health care system rather than to save lives. It is important that we remember that, as much as our public health officials would prefer that we believe otherwise, these things are not synonymous. When it comes to saving lives, the big question with regards to flattening the curve is which is most likely to produce the most fatalities – a short-term, temporary, overload of the health care system during which treatment will not be available to everyone who requires it or an artificial extension of the duration of the pandemic and the lifespan of the virus giving it more opportunities to mutate and do more harm. To flatten the curve is to produce said artificial extension of the duration of the pandemic.

Our governments are being rather less than honest with us about the fact that the absurd time frames – up to two years - that we are seeing in their projection models are the result of the strategy of flattening the curve rather than the reason for it. The only way to push the peak of curve down is by slowing down the rate of infection and thus extending the duration of the pandemic long past the virus’ natural cycle. Even if doing this were to prove to be less fatal in terms of those who ultimately die from the virus it is an incredibly stupid and insane thing to do because it maximizes the myriad sorts of other damage that will be done by the shutdown.

Shocking as it will be for the many Canadians who worship at the altar of Tommy Douglas to hear this, the collapse of the health care system would not mean the end of the world. The hospitals would recover from such a collapse a lot quicker than the economy will recover from the shutdown, our social and communal lives will recover from our being brainwashed into fearing ordinary human contact, and our heritage of Common Law rights and freedoms will recover from our having willingly surrendered all of our most basic freedoms the moment some Hitler with a stethoscope told us to do so to avoid catching and spreading a bad bug.

The long-term negative consequences of the means being employed to flatten the curve of the coronavirus pandemic so outweigh the benefit of saving the health care system that those who for whatever reason have decided upon this strategy have been trying to sell it to the public by pretending that it is the only option for dealing with this pandemic that is available. Consider, for example, the way in which our Dominion and provincial governments have released over the past couple of weeks the projection models that they have been working with. In the press conferences where these models were released contrasts were drawn. On the one hand, we were given the numbers of those that these models predict will be infected with the virus and die under the measures currently being taken. On the other hand, we were given the numbers of those that according to the model would have been infected and died had we done nothing at all.

All of this is, of course, an obvious example of bifurcation, of the logical fallacy of the false dilemma. It is hardly the case that the only options available to us were to do what we are presently doing or to do nothing. A strategy of protecting the most vulnerable, while letting everybody else go about their daily lives, would reduce the number of deaths expected from the pandemic without the numerous ill effects of flattening the curve. The Kingdom of Sweden is following such a strategy and it appears to be working for them. It has not been often in the last century that Sweden has been a model of sound and sane public policy. It figures that after following their bad example on any number of other issues, usually having something or the other to do with gender politics and political correctness, that when they actually get something right we would ignore them.

Dissenting epidemiologist, Dr. Knut Wittkowski, who was the head of Rockefeller University’s Department of Biostatics, Epidemiology, and Research Design for twenty years, has argued that there is no good reason to extend the duration of a respiratory disease’s run through the population and that the present regime of extreme social distancing and shut down, far from being the best or only response to the pandemic, is the worst. He is far from being the only epidemiologist to think this way and to disagree with the strategy being pursued by most public health authorities. As is generally the case, when the mainstream media claims that a consensus of scientific experts is behind a policy which they and the government support, they are lying through their teeth.

That there is a great deal of uncertainty about this virus and pandemic is acknowledged by all. That the measures being taken to combat it will have devastating effects of their own, which will only get worse the longer they are kept in place, is a certainty. Yet the strategy which underlies these measures, requires that they be kept in place for a very long time. This is hardly grounds for the blind confidence in our public health authorities that they are demanding from us at this moment.

Indeed, they are starting to give the impression that we would have been better off seeking the advice of that alternative medicine practitioner whose answer to everything is “ooo eee ooo ah ah, ting tang, walla walla bing bang.”

The Greta Syndrome – A Diagnosis

It is sad to see what has become of the Kingdom of Sweden. At some point in the twentieth century, I think around the time of the Second World War, their political class developed a naïve and superstitious faith in the ability of social scientists to improve their customs and mores through radical experimentation. Perhaps the Nazis slipped some mind-altering substance into their water supply during the war that has been producing this lingering effect. Whatever the cause, the result has been that they have taken progressive social engineering to an extreme beyond what can be found in most other Western countries. This is most obvious when it comes to their policies and laws with regards to gender identity and the raising of children.

Sweden boasts of the fact that she was the first country to pass a total ban on corporal punishment. This happened back in the 1960s and about sixty countries have followed their example. Many other countries have passed partial bans, prohibiting it in schools but not in the home. From the über-progressive Swedish perspective this is something in which their country can take pride – they were ahead of the times, trend-setting, fashionable and forward-thinking. From the proper perspective, that is to say, my own, their being ahead of the times, trend-setting, fashionable, and forward-thinking is something of which they ought to be deeply ashamed. What it really means is that they have gone stark, börking, mad.

King Solomon, who was a far more trustworthy authority than some wacko sociologist or psychologist, wrote “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.” (Proverbs 13:24)

Everywhere you look today you will find evidence that Solomon knew what he was talking about and that progressive social engineers are full of a nasty-smelling natural fertilizer. A few decades ago they took the strap out of the schools and now, at least in large urban centres, it has become necessary to go through airport-style security checks in order to enter them. At approximately the same time, quacks purporting to be experts on child-raising began peddling the message of permissiveness in cheap books and on bad television shows. They condemned methods that have been tested and proven over the course of centuries as barbaric and cruel. Spanking in particular, they likened to child abuse. As parents – and legislators – began listening to them and taking them seriously, authority in the home collapsed.

The anti-corporal punishment message caught on due to its superficial appeal to the feelings of parents. Parents love their children, people do not want those they love to suffer pain, corporal punishment inflicts pain, and therein lies the temptation to believe those who preach against spanking. Note carefully, however, the wording of King Solomon’s proverb quoted above. True love is not the empty, sentimental, feeling that is so often called by that name in the age in which we live. It also includes a commitment to meet one’s obligations towards those one loves. At the very minimum, parents have an obligation to their children to raise them – to instruct them in the right path and correct them when they go wrong. What the progressive and liberal theory of child raising really amounts to is the idea that parents should let children raise themselves. While this is certainly in keeping with the liberal ideal which makes complete individual self-determination out to be the highest good it is not consistent with genuine parental love.

It can hardly be surprising, therefore, that the country that took the first step down this path of utter madness is also the country that produced the most celebrated case of juvenile delinquency in the world today. There are many who would object to this description of Swedish enfant terrible Greta Thunberg but consider the actions that made her famous and then tell me that the träsko doesn’t fit.

After bullying her parents into depriving themselves of essential nutrients by going vegan she launched her career as a youthful rabble-rouser by encouraging children to play hooky from school in order to attend protest rallies demanding that governments ruin the lives of all the families that depend upon the petroleum industry – or raising livestock – for their livelihood. Her justification for all of this horrendously bad behaviour is her fear of climate change. Not real climate change but the bugbear of the eco-socialists.

Real climate change is a matter of long cyclical patterns of warming and cooling that have been going on since the beginning of time and will continue until the end of time. A multitude of factors, most if not all of which are beyond human control, contribute to it. It is not a bad thing, it is a part of the way things are. Periods of warming are nothing to be feared. People thrive in warmer periods. One thousand years ago, Thunberg’s Viking ancestors were able to farm Greenland thanks to one.

The eco-socialist version is a fictional horror story in which carbon emissions produced by human industry are the principle driving factor in climate change which threatens all life on the planet with extinction. It was thought up to serve the libido dominandi of men like George Soros and the late Maurice Strong who seem to have taken the supervillains in the movies based on Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels as their role models.

A lot of people have been duped into believing this nonsense, of course, but they do not all go around encouraging truancy and rebellion, throwing temper tantrums before assemblies of world leaders, and stirring up strife in other countries. Some would try to explain Thunberg’s aberrant behaviour by pointing to her having Asperger’s Syndrome and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder but I think that it is unfair to lump all who suffer from these conditions in with peace disturbing troublemakers like Greta.

No, I think the explanation is to be found in Sweden’s spanking laws. Had Sweden allowed Greta’s parents to discipline her properly, she may still have been taken in by the eco-socialist propaganda, but they would have been able to exert their authority to prevent her from acting on her fears in such an inappropriate, socially destructive manner.

We have not yet banned corporal punishment entirely in the Dominion of Canada, although it is probably on the Liberals’ agenda. Only parents are allowed to exercise this kind of discipline, however.

That is, perhaps, a pity. Had it been otherwise, when Greta recently travelled to Alberta to demand the total destruction of the province’s economy, their premier Jason Kenney could have turned her over his knee and publicly given her a lesson that would have done her a world of good.

Just Say No to the Nordic Model

In 1988, when the Supreme Court of Canada handed down its ruling in R. v. Morgentaler, our laws against abortion were already quite light, having been liberalized by Pierre Elliot Trudeau, our worst Prime Minister ever and the father of the dingbat who is currently leader of the Liberal Party, within months of his taking over the reins of power from Lester Pearson. This did not prevent the Supreme Court from ruling against Her Majesty the Queen and in favour of a Polish born quack who had survived the Holocaust of Dachau to pursue a career of killing the unborn here in Canada. All existing laws against abortion were struck down and no government since has succeeded in introducing new ones. Nor has any government since Mulroney’s seriously tried. As a result, there continue to be no legal restrictions on the clinical killing of foeti prior to and up until the moment of birth and, thanks to Tommy Douglas’ single-payer health system, every Canadian with enough moral sanity to recognize that abortion is murder, has to contribute to it through his taxes.

Last December, the Supreme Court had another such Solomonic moment. Just before Christmas they decided to hand out tricks as well as treats and made it their ruling in Canada v. Bedford that the laws against running brothels, soliciting on the streets, and living off of prostitution were unconstitutional. Parliament was given one year to come up with better laws in the duration of which the old ones will remain in effect. If Parliament fails to do so, as of December there will be no legal restrictions on prostitution in Canada.

While the ruling in Morgentaler was stupid, unconscionable, and downright evil, the ruling in Bedford does make a certain amount of sense. Prostitution itself was not illegal in Canada. Therefore, all that these laws that were ruled unconstitutional actually did was to harass people engaged in what is technically a legal trade. This is hardly right and fair and those who fought for the elimination of such laws had a point when they argued that this kind of legislation made the trade more dangerous for those involved.

Why not make prostitution itself illegal then?

Well, the problem with that solution is that prostitution is just the sale of sexual intercourse. Like most Western countries, Canada has liberalized its laws so that sexual immorality itself, fornication, adultery, etc. is neither prohibited nor punished by law. There are good arguments that can be made for and against this liberalization. The case against it is that it weakens marriage, the family, and the social order in general. The case in favour of it is that to be enforceable, laws against sexual immorality would require that we empower the police to spy on people in the privacy of the bedroom. These arguments are both quite strong, indeed, they are ironclad. Whichever argument you or I might think to be the best, the political reality is that the only change we are likely to see any time in the near future is in the direction of further liberalization. This is my point – in the absence of laws against sexual immorality, laws prohibiting prostitution do not make sense. Such laws would in effect be saying to people “screw around all you want, just don’t let any money change hands while you are doing it.” Surely the stupidity in that is plain to be seen.

Given my druthers, I would have the government take the opportunity the Supreme Court has handed it, to decentralize and localize legislation restricting prostitution. Of all conceivable laws restricting the sale of sex, the kind that seem the most sensible and necessary to me are those that are passed locally, are locally enforced and which are designed to keep it out of residential neighborhoods and away from schools and playgrounds. Have Parliament hand over the regulating and restricting of prostitution entirely to city, town, and municipal governments that make laws only for themselves and the neighborhoods they live in. Nothing further is necessary.

Now, not everybody would agree with this, naturally, and it would be a dull world if that were not the case. There are those who think of prostitution in the same way that the neo-Puritans of the early twentieth century viewed the consumption of alcohol and the neo-Puritans of the late twentieth century regarded the use of narcotics – as a great and terrible evil towards the stomping out of which all the powers of government must be marshalled. We all know how well Prohibition and the War on Drugs turned out, after all.

One person who prefers the neo-Puritan, prohibitionist approach to prostitution is Joy Smith, the Conservative Member of Parliament for the constituency of Kildonan-St. Paul here in Winnipeg. Smith is a moral crusader, noted for her efforts against human trafficking. This is to her credit, of course, as no sane person could find anything defensible in human trafficking. Her response to the Supreme Court’s ruling that our prostitution laws need to be rewritten has been to campaign for what is called the “Nordic model”, i.e., the kind of laws that are in place in Sweden.

A red flag should have popped up immediately at the mention of Sweden. Sweden is a country that has much to admire including her constitutional monarchy and her national, albeit now disestablished, church that combines a Lutheran confession with the historical episcopacy. These are all centuries old, however. While Sweden may still be impressive in terms of her unusually high quality pop groups, her beautiful women and her Muppet chefs, her statesmanship has long left something to be desired. Her abandonment of her long-established traditional cultural identity for multiculturalism, extreme political correctness, and bizarre obsession with turning sex into something one chooses rather than something one is born with, all lead one to the inevitable conclusion that, not to put too fine a point on it, the members of her polite class have all gone børking mad. She is the last country whose recent political innovations we ought to consider imitating.

What the Nordic model entails is simply this – laws that target the customer rather than the provider, the john rather than the prostitute. While this approach makes a certain amount of sense from an economic point of view – cut off the demand and there will be no incentive for there to be a supply – it is highly dubious from the ethical point of view. Think of what the equivalent strategy in combatting the drug trade would look like. It would mean having law enforcement focus on arresting users for drug possession rather than going after dealers, supplies, and smugglers. Indeed, the police have often come under criticism for doing just that.

Someone might object to that comparison by saying that in drug trafficking the supplier is the victimizer, taking advantage of his client’s addiction to make a profit out of selling him the meanas of his own destruction whereas in prostitution it is the supplier, the hooker, who is the victim. The problem with that reasoning is that if prostitutes are victims as a class, their victimizers are not the people Joy Smith and company wish to punish. Individually, prostitutes may frequently suffer violence at the hands of individual clients. As a class, they can only rightly be regarded as the victims of the men who through various means force them into prostitution, i.e., their pimps. We could pass laws targeting the kind of men who kidnap girls, addict them to drugs, and force them to sell their bodies. Those laws would for the most part look identical to the laws the Supreme Court struck down.

The fact of the matter is that the clients of prostitution are a class of victims too, the victims of feminism. The true purpose of feminism, the so-called ”women’s movement”, was never to benefit women so much as to break the one woman for one man pattern of traditional, monagamous, marriage so that alpha males could horde women. It is from the deprived and desperate numbers of the beta-or-lower males that the client base for prostitution is derived. There is more than a hint of feminism in the movement to rewrite the prostitution laws to punish the clients rather than the prostitutes. This means that if the laws are changed in this way, feminism will have succeeded in victimizing this class twice over.

Rather than jump on this bandwagon of injustice, it would be far better to either return to the status quo ante, go for complete liberalization, or follow my earlier suggestion of decentralized, local regulations and restrictions.

Finally, if an attempt to starve off prostitution by cutting off the demand is still seen as desirable, then the best way to do so is not to introduce laws targetting the clients, but by cleaning up the sex-saturated culture and passing laws that strengthen rather than weaken the traditional family and marriage. Just as the trade in destructive narcotics will not go away as long as pharmacetical companies continue to promote their products as the instant cure to all your pain in their advertisements, so the demand for prostitution will not lessen as long as television, movies, magazines and books continue to preach the message "just do it" and to use sex to sell their products.