The Approach of Winter

At midnight, as Remembrance Day ended and at least four weeks of Code Red lockdown on the province of Manitoba began, it was snowing in Winnipeg.   Within a couple of hours the ground was white and, as of noon on the twelfth, the snow was stilling coming down.    This is not unusual for Manitoba around this time of year.   This city is referred to as "Winterpeg" for a reason.    While the forecast is predicting a rise to low but above freezing temperatures on the weekend and again around Wednesday of next week, overall the highs predicted for the next two weeks are below the freezing point.   Weather forecasting is notoriously unreliable, but at this time of year unforeseen complications often include sudden and quick-moving low pressure systems sweeping the prairies and bringing a ton of wind, snow, and cold along with them.   As we get this taste of the long winter we know is inevitably coming, grocery stores and other businesses fortunate enough to be considered essential by the health bureaucrats and politicians who arrogantly think they have the right to designate other people's businesses and livelihoods as otherwise, have been reduced to twenty-five percent capacity.    This means long lineups, out in the cold, waiting to get into the store to buy what you need to keep you and your family from starving.

 

Let us think about that for a moment.

 

How many of you when you were growing up, heard your mothers say to you, too many times to count, something to the effect of “get inside, do you want to catch your death of pneumonia?”

 

I think it is a safe assumption to say that the vast majority of you would answer “yes.”    Unless you have suffered from a lifelong agoraphobia, in the conventional sense of a fear of the outdoors rather than the more technical clinical sense, chances are good that when you were a child you would play outdoors in cold and wet weather, with little thought to protecting yourself against the elements, prompting such an expression of maternal concern.

 

Now consider the irony.   Brent Roussin, our local public health mandarin, has issued orders that will require people to stand outside in cold and most likely wet weather for long periods of time.   The purpose of these orders is to prevent people from catching their death from the severe type of pneumonia that, in a small minority of cases, those who contract the bat flu virus experience.

 

Who do you trust more, Brent Roussin or your mother?

 

There are those who will answer by saying that this is an unfair question.   Roussin is an expert on these sort of things, after all, and our mothers, except, of course, for the ones who happened to also be physicians and epidemiologists, were not.   All of that, however, is another way of saying “shut up, don’t think for yourself, just listen to the experts and don’t ask questions.”

 

It is also advocating for stupidity.

 

It is obvious to anyone with any amount of life experience and common sense that Roussin’s orders are going to result in more people getting sick rather than less.     Not only are we entering a period of cold and wet weather, in which, thanks to the public health orders we are all going to have to stand outside in long lineups, this is a season in which people always get sick.  It is the period in which sunlight hours are the shortest, everyone has a Vitamin D deficiency and therefore a weakened immune system, and, consequently, the bugs that are always with us are able to do their worst.

 

This is a huge problem for us because, as I have discussed previously, Roussin and the premier’s attitude since the end of September has been one of piling restrictions upon restrictions upon restrictions when the previous restrictions failed to reduce the number of cases, blaming the failure on the disobedience of the public, and threatening and bullying people.  What are the chances that they are finally going to realize – or, rather, admit – that the problem is not with the public, but with this entire approach?   It doesn’t work and no amount of hiring more enforcers, raising the fines, berating and haranguing us, and taking away more of our rights and freedoms, is ever going to change that.    Unless Roussin and Pallister finally acknowledge this, they will just keep piling rule after useless rule upon us.   Since, unlike with the first lockdown, we are transitioning into the period of maximum sickness rather than out of it, that will be going on for a long time.

 

The person whose job it is to raise these kind of questions, challenge the government when its policies and actions are stupid and wrong, and fight the government when its actions infringe upon our traditional and constitutional rights and freedoms, is the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.   That may yet happen at the Dominion level, where the Prime Minister, Captain Airhead, has been urging the provincial governments to take drastic measures to stop the spread of the bat flu.   I have my doubts.   Erin O’Toole should have spoken out long before now.   The only leader of a Dominion level political party who has consistently spoken out for the traditional rights and freedoms of Canadians against these draconian lockdowns has been Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada, who has no sitting Members in Parliament.   At the provincial level here in Manitoba, Wab Kinew has been doing the opposite of his job.   He has been demanding more restrictions than those the government has been imposing, criticizing the Health Minister for meeting with and giving a hearing to people who expressed their opposition to such measures, and, most recently, condemning the government for relaxing one of the more odious elements of the recent public health orders, i.e., restricting social interaction to within the immediate household.   I wonder if it ever occurred to Mr. Kinew, who is married and has three sons, to think about what such an order would mean to the many people who live by themselves, far more today than in previous times?

 

Lockdowns do a lot of damage and, furthermore, they hurt a lot more people than the bat flu does.   While socialists like Kinew and his echo chamber in the local CBC and most of the “private” media, justify their support of lockdowns in spite of this fact on the grounds that the harm lockdowns do is merely economic whereas the virus kills, this reasoning is entirely spurious.    Enforcing extreme social isolation upon a society where loneliness was already a problem will increase the rates of suicide and addiction.   Note, with regards to the latter, that once again stores specializing in booze and the mind-destroying toxins that can be extracted from certain cultivars of hemp are deemed essential and allowed to operate at a time when all religious services have been ordered to close.   Lockdowns, not to put too fine a point on it, kill.

 

To attempt to stop the spread of the bat flu with a lockdown is a major violation of medical ethics.   It is also incredibly stupid.  That you cannot lock people away from a plague is not exactly a new insight.   It was the point made by Edgar Allan Poe in his The Masque of the Red Death, originally published in 1842.   Perhaps the egalitarian socialists who support lockdowns think they have avoided the hubris and nemesis of Poe’s Prince Prospero by locking away the common people as well as the wealthy, but the harm inflicted by lockdowns falls disproportionately on the poor.    We are, again, entering the winter season.   With the new health orders, homeless shelters are operating at reduced capacity, public places such as libraries are closed to them, as are restaurant dining rooms.   With all the businesses closed and jobs lost due to the earlier lockdown measures and these new ones, I very much doubt there are fewer homeless in this province than at this time last year.   All of these physicians who have been petitioning the government for stricter lockdown measures, as if crashing everything else in an attempt to prevent the hospitals from crashing made any sense, ought to stripped of their medical credentials and busted down to jobs that cannot be done by video teleconference from home.

 

As we enter into winter the demonic spirit behind the lockdowns becomes even more apparent.  With winter comes Christmas.    Indeed, the last Sunday of the current liturgical year, Christ the King, or, what used to be called “Stir-up Sunday” after the first words of the Book of Common Prayer’s Collect for that day, is the Sunday after the next, only a little over a week away.   The lockdown orders currently extend into at least the first two weeks of Advent.   The Jewish festival of lights, Hanukkah, is scheduled to begin this year right after the time the lockdown orders as they currently stand expire, but if the current four weeks of province-wide Code Red lockdown does not stop the spread of the bat flu, and it is hardly likely that it will, the next thing on deck will be for the same Grinches that stole Easter and Passover earlier this year, to steal Christmas and Hanukkah too.    Having robbed us of the joyous celebration of our Lord and Saviour’s Glorious Resurrection, they appear set to rob us of the joyous celebration of His Nativity and Incarnation as well. 

 

The ordinary thermometer cold of winter is not enough for these people.   They wish to drive the warmth of faith from our hearts as well.

 

 

 

Environmentalists, I Want My Money Back!

It is difficult to type with one’s fingers crossed but the superstition that says that we might jinx a desired happening by announcing its arrival prematurely would seem to require that I do so in saying that this winter seems to finally be over. It was the worst winter that I can remember and the people who keep track of this sort of thing have told us that this is the worst on record since 1898. Since I live in a city that is noted for its bad winters, leading to the inevitable “Winterpeg” pun on its name, that is truly saying something. It started earlier than usual, hit us from the beginning with the kind of cold temperatures we usually receive in January/February accompanied by blasting winds and an unusual relentlessness. In the rare and short breaks in the relentless cold we received large amounts of snow, usually far in excess of what the meteorologists predicted, making this the oddity of a winter that was harsh in both extreme temperatures and snowfalls. March came in like a lion, with a weekend in which it got even colder, and went out like the exact same animal, as, to mix metaphors, the winter took one last stab at us with its dying breath.

In all of this I cannot help but wonder what happened to the global warming the environmentalists have been promising us for almost as long as I can remember. I think that Winnipeggers have a good case for a class action lawsuit against the environmental lobby on the grounds of false advertising. Have we been breathing out all that carbon dioxide for decades for nothing? Somebody make sure that David Suzuki does not flee the country while I speak with a lawyer!

It seems to be an open-and-shut case to me. Granted, the defence might attempt to argue that you and I have not lived up to our end of the bargain, but realistically I don’t think they have a leg to stand on. Surely we cannot be expected to spend all of our spare time cruising around the city emitting greenhouse gasses, what with the rising price of petroleum and the state of the city’s pothole-ridden streets. Furthermore, there are only so many uses to which an aerosol spray may be put, even if one is somehow able to still find a can that uses chlorofluorocarbons.

Of course the environmental lobby might try to escape facing the music by pointing out, with an uncharacteristic display of honesty and candor, that back when they got into the business of apocalyptic scaremongering in the 1970s it was the doom of global cooling that they first conjured up in their crystal ball. Indeed, having seen the handwriting on the wall like old king Belshazzar of Babylon, many of the environmental prophets of doom have in recent years again switched their terminology, now preferring to speak of climate change, a conveniently vague phrase that covers any conceivable change in global weather patterns. In the unlikely event that the global climate was to evolve so that the planet became a universal, year round, tropical paradise, this too could be accurately described as climate change. The coining of the expression climate change was the greatest moment in the history of covering all of one’s bases since Charles Dickens declared it to be both the best and worst of times!

Please do not misunderstand me. My point is not that concerns and fears about the environment are never to be taken more seriously than those of a nutty old man in a potato sack with long hair and a beard carrying a “The End is Near” placard. We humans are finite beings who live in a finite world with limited resources. Some of those resources are renewable, others are not. We have a right to use the resources available to us but that right does not take precedence over our duty to take care of our world and to conserve its resources so that they will still be available for future generations. We also have a duty to avoid disposing of the waste products of our use of resources in such a way as to mar the beauty of our surroundings or taint our water supplies and atmosphere. While all of this seems fairly obvious once it is pointed out, it is also easy to ignore in practice. The conservationist movement began as a legitimate and necessary response to the depletion of forests and the disappearance of various species of wildlife. Environmentalism in the broader sense of the term, was started in response to the very real problem of the pollution of air and water due to industrialization.

The problem is that in the late twentieth century the environmentalist movement, which originally attracted a wide range of supporters, was hijacked by socialists. Socialism, like pollution, is an unpleasant by-product of industrialization. As the socialists gained control of environmentalism its message came less and less to resemble common sense and more and more to resemble crackpot anti-business propaganda. It is one thing to say that a resource like our forests ought to be preserved so that future generations can enjoy it as well. That is both reasonable and in accordance with common sense. It is another thing to say that logging companies, driven by the profit motive, would, if not prevented by activists and government agencies, deplete the forests. This makes no sense whatsoever. Even if a company has a callous disregard to all concerns other than profit-making it will be concerned about its long-term profits as well as its short-term profits and there is no long-term profit in using up your resources. This is why reforestation, a conservationist project, has long been a project of the forestry industry.

It is the socialist infiltration of the environmentalist movement that brought about the scaremongering campaign about man-made climate change. The gist of what the environmentalists claim is that the greenhouse gasses that human beings have emitted into the atmosphere over the last couple of centuries are altering the global climate so as to pose an imminent threat to human existence. For this claim to make any sense it would have to be the case that the world’s climate has been more or less the same throughout human history until the last century or so. This is not remotely close to being true, no matter how many hockey stick graphs are drawn up, or how many tiresomely egotistical “documentaries” Al Gore makes. A thousand years ago, Norsemen settled the west coast of Greenland and established nice, farming communities in the moderate climate they found there. Needless to say, these colonies did not survive the coming of the Little Ice Age in the fourteenth century. These sort of historical truths are rather inconvenient for the theory of man-made global warming and its supporters.

Man-made climate change, we are told by the scaremongers, places our very existence in jeopardy. Huge bodies of ice, floating on the ocean, will melt, they tell us, raising the level of the seas until they overflow their banks, inundate coastal cities, and basically create a need for Noah to return and round up the animals two by two once again. Presumably, whenever these people order a cold drink they guzzle it down very fast lest the ice melt and their drink overflow.

The theory of man-made climate change is not a theory drawn up to explain observable data but rather to promote a political end which is the signing of international agreements concerning the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. These treaties, however, would not reduce the world’s greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to prevent the predicted climatic disasters even if the theory were sound. The only effect such treaties could possibly have, would be the handicapping of Western countries to the advantage of non-Western countries and an increase in the amount of socialism in Western countries.

Frankly, I’d rather have the global warming.

Winter in Winnipeg - A Sonnet

The milk-white snow drifts deep across the street
Blown by an ice cold wind out of the north.
The sidewalk, slippery with last night's sleet,
Spells doom for those who from their house set forth.

The sun, half-hidden behind thick grey clouds,
Provides a little light but not much heat.
Wool scarves, wrapped tighter than bleak funeral shrouds,
Conceal the face of every one you meet.

There's hoar-frost covering every hydro line
And icicles are hanging from the eaves.
It is so cold that even booze and brine
Have reached the point at which they both will freeze.

All of these things place one thought on the brain -
It's winter time in Winnipeg again!