Don't Trust the Experts

 

Until a short time ago the word "misinformation" referred to statements purporting to be factual which fell short in some way, whether in letter or spirit, of the ancient and ageless transcendental landmark known as truth.   "Disinformation" meant the same, but with the additional connotation that the erroneous information was being spread in mala fide by those with a deliberate intent to deceive.   Both words have been in the soi-disant news far more frequently in recent days than has been the norm in the past.   Indeed, it would almost seem that other words have dropped out of the vocabularies of our regular commentators on passing events, because they have been using these multiple times per day.   It would appear, however, that the words have undergone a change in meaning.   They now seem to mean anything which differs or disagrees with whatever the media's approved experts happen to be saying at any given moment even if it conforms with what they had been saying in the moment immediately prior to that one.

 

 

This is indicative of just how far we have apostatized from the wisdom of the ancients who sought the illumination of the eternal beacons of Goodness, Beauty and Truth to light their path.   To the extent that the media, the information machine which has far too much influence over how we perceive and think of the world, acknowledges truth today, it is truth in the old leftist sense of whatever advances the cause of the revolution.   This, of course, is not truth at all in the proper and older sense of that permanent standard, recognized as a basic aspect of being itself, which we strive to attain by conforming our indicative or descriptive speech to reality, i.e., things as they are in themselves.

 

 

Ultimately what we are seeing is the result of centuries of assault on the foundations laid for Western thought, at least in its Classical and Christian phases, by the Attic philosophers, specifically the Socratic school and especially Socrates himself.   I addressed this matter earlier this year in an essay about how Western academe has betrayed the very foundation of its venerable tradition, the first of a series that scrutinized the corruption of the various branches of the universities.   It is worth revisiting now as the media is once again telling us to blindly trust the experts as they impose all sorts of invasive restrictions on us in total disregard of our prescriptive and constitutional civil rights and basic freedoms in the name of keeping us safe.

 

 

If the message of the Socrates who has come down to us primarily through the writings of Plato could be summarized in one sentence, which, of course, it cannot, that sentence would be "don't trust the experts".   For Socrates' career as a philosopher basically consisted of going around and pestering experts, those who claimed to have authoritative knowledge about courage, justice, piety and the like, with questions that demonstrated that the experts didn't really know what they were talking about and didn't possess the kind of knowledge they professed.   He was, in other words, someone who spent his entire life doing the exact opposite of what those who say "shut up and listen to the science" tell us to do when we question the climatologists' prophecies of doom by pointing out holes in the theory of anthropogenic climate change or question the epidemiologists' insistence that we must sacrifice all of our freedoms and necessary social interaction and put ourselves in house arrest for weeks and months at a time to prevent the spread of the Chinese bat flu.   

 

 

"Isn't it true that human beings have historically thrived better in warmer periods than colder periods?"

 

 

"Isn't it true that climate has been constantly changing through history and that this has affected how people live rather than the other way around?"

 

 

"What about that Danish study from this summer in which masks were found not to reduce the spread of the virus?"

 

 

"What about all the deaths that lockdowns cause?"

 

 

"Why should we believe that the same health authorities who support abortion and euthanasia are taking our freedoms away because they want to save lives?"

 

 

"Why all this hype about a virus that is non-lethal for well over 99 percent of people under 65 and in good health,  most of whom will experience only mild symptoms or none at all?"

 

 

The answer we hear to these questions and countless others like them is always "Shut up, listen to the science, and trust the experts".

 

 

Some might raise the objection to my point that today's experts differ from the ones to whom Socrates was, in his own words as recorded by Plato in the Apologia, a "gadfly", in that they have science to back up their claims to authoritative knowledge.

 

 

Let us consider that argument and see whether it can bear up under scrutiny.

 

 

Science, although it bears the Latin word for knowledge as its name, is not synonymous with knowledge but is rather a specific type of knowledge.   The admirers of Modern science see the history of its development as one of unprecedented and exponential expansion of human knowledge to the benefit of the species.   This is not, however, the only way to look at it.   From a different perspective Modern science can be seen as a contraction rather than an expansion of knowledge.   Furthermore, it is rather difficult to deny that science has done harm to the species as well as good.

 

 

Whether science is an expansion or contraction of knowledge depends on what measuring stick you are using.   Allow me to illustrate.  Imagine two men with studies in their home in which their personal libraries are kept.   The one man keeps all of his books in a single bookcase.   The shelves are crammed full and overflowing.   The other man has several bookcases around the room, but none of them is full and there is plenty of space for other books.    Which of the two has the larger library?

 

 

The answer depends upon how you are determining library size.   If the measurement is in bookcases the second man obviously has the larger library.   If, however, we are measuring in number of books, the first man might have the larger library.   Indeed, for the sake of making the point of the illustration let us stipulate that he does have more books in his one bookcase than the other in his many.  Therefore the answer to the question of which has the larger library is different when size is measured by bookcases than by books.

 

 

Now here is how that illustration applies to science: pre-modern science was integrated into philosophy which concerned itself with the whole of reality.   Pre-modern science like Modern science, involved specialized knowledge of different aspects of reality, but, being integrated into philosophy as it was, it recognized the general knowledge of the whole that philosophy sought after to be the higher and greater knowledge, and therefore did not exclude any part of that whole as an area of interest for its more concentrated study.   The science that emerged from the transition into the Modern Age, by contrast, was far less integrated into philosophy, which itself was undergoing a radical transformation, and not, in my opinion, for the better.   Neither Modern science nor Modern philosophy shared the pre-modern hierarchical ranking of general knowledge of the whole as higher and superior to specialized knowledge of the parts.   Furthermore, Modern science narrowed the areas in which it was interested, excluding several parts or aspects of the whole of reality that pre-modern science had not so excluded.

 

 

In other words, when it comes to the parts of the whole of reality that science concerns itself with, Modern science is actually interested in less than pre-modern science.   This is often overlooked since Modern science has subdivided those fewer parts of reality that have retained its interest into multiple fields to facilitate its scrutiny of each.   Think of it as being like a food store that originally sold all different kinds of food – meat, fruit, vegetables, dairy, grains, etc. – then limited itself to fruit, but multiplied the kinds of fruit it offered, now including all the exotic varieties alongside every available type of the staple apples, oranges, pears, peaches and bananas.   Although it has actually narrowed what it has to offer, someone who only ever entered the store to buy fruit might miss this because for him the variety has increased.   The point is that when measured by the criteria of the portion of reality that Modern science takes an interest in compared with pre-modern science, the development of Modern science is clearly a contraction of knowledge rather than an expansion.

 

When it comes to the areas in which Modern science has retained an interest, it has, undeniably, expanded one type of knowledge about those areas, and that exponentially.   That type of knowledge is the kind that answers such questions as “How does this work?” and “What is this made of?”    That providing highly detailed answers to such questions in no way answers such questions as “what is this thing in itself?” and “what is the good of such things?” was beautifully illustrated by C. S. Lewis in the exchange on the nature of a star between Ramandu and Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and explained more prosaically in a number of his non-fictional writings.

 

 

The reason Modern science can answer the one type of question well and in great depth but is hopeless at answering the other type of question is the same reason why it is interested in some parts of the whole that is reality and not others.   Finding the answers to the first type of questions with regards to the areas in which it is interested serves the end of Modern science.   Finding the answers to the second type of questions does not serve that end.   Nor is there anything in the areas of reality which Modern science has excluded from its interest that would serve that end.

 

 

This is because the end of Modern science, that for which it seeks and strives, is not truth at all, but power and control.   As C. S. Lewis opened his lecture on “The Abolition of Man”, the third of the lectures transcribed and published together under the same title in 1943, “’Man’s conquest of Nature’ is an expression often used to describe the progress of applied science”.   Lewis’ entire lecture is well worth reading to understand the implications, positive and negative of this, as is the entire book in which it can be found and, for that matter, his treatment of the same subject in That Hideous Strength, the third and longest of his “Space Trilogy” in which theological and philosophical discussion is presented in the form of science fiction.   That this is the goal of Modern science, however, rests not merely on the assertion of one of its more distinguished critics.   We also have the word of one of its earliest advocates.   Sir Francis Bacon famously expressed the end of Modern science as the mission statement of his fictional Salomon’s House in his unfinished novel The New Atlantis (1626), “the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”

 

 

It is because this is its purpose that Modern science is interested only in those parts of reality which it can bend to serve the human will and only in the kind of knowledge that serves that purpose, such as what those things it wishes to bend and harness into service are made of and how they work.   Answers to the questions of what things are in themselves, what their good is, how they fit in to the larger whole of reality, and how they contribute to the good of that whole, are entirely irrelevant to that purpose, as indispensable as they are to Truth.   Indeed, true knowledge of the good of things in themselves and the part they play in the order of reality as a whole, would in many cases run counter to the goal of Modern science for it would identify a good for all things which is not imposed upon them by the will of man, and to which man is obligated to bend his will.

 

The history of Modern science itself demonstrates that truth is entirely irrelevant to it at the theoretical level.   Theory is the essential link between scientific fact gathering – observation and recording – and scientific application – the use of those facts to bend the nature of things into the service of the will of man.   It begins as hypothesis – an interpretive explanation of what has been observed – which, if it survives testing by experimentation, becomes theory, that is to say, an explanation that is accepted and taken to be true for the purpose of devising further hypotheses and developing practical applications.   This is the means whereby science has obtained its great success at manipulating the nature of things to serve man’s will.   This success, however, has never required that the theories underlying human invention actually be true.    Indeed, most if not all of what are considered to be Modern science’s greatest successes, are the culmination of a series of advancements, each based upon a theory that has subsequently been shown to be false.    Success for Modern science is measured by whether it works, not by whether it is true.   The philosophy of science took a major step towards acknowledging this in the twentieth century, when Sir Karl Popper successfully replaced “verifiability” with “falsifiability” as the litmus test of whether a theory is truly scientific or not.   To be scientific, Popper argued, a theory must be falsifiable, that is, susceptible to being shown to be false.   Logic, of course, would tell us that if a theory is capable of being shown to be false, it is, therefore false, and, indeed, Gordon H. Clark argued convincingly that all scientific theories are false, by the standards of logic, for they all involve the fallacy of asserting the consequent.

 

 

Now perhaps you are wondering whether any of this matters or not.   Since science presumably aims at using the mastery over nature it seeks to benefit mankind is not the question of whether it works all that really matters?  This objection would have more validity if everything science had accomplished had been beneficial.   Some things science has given us – the ability to preserve food longer for example – are unquestionably beneficial.   Other things science has given us – nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction – are decidedly not so beneficial, quite the opposite as a matter of fact.

 

 

This is directly related to everything we have seen about how Modern science has divorced its inquiries from an appreciation of things as they are in themselves, contemplation of the whole, and Truth as it was classically and traditionally understood.   A science that seeks only such knowledge as can be used to bend nature to man’s will is a science that recognizes no limits on man’s will.   Such a science is incapable of distinguishing between a good use of its mastery of nature and a bad use.   Goodness like Truth, from which it can be distinguished but never separated, is a transcendental, an element of the permanent order of reality that cannot be bent to serve human will but which requires man to bend his will instead to his own peril if he refuses.  Since Modern science is based upon an assertion of the will in rejection of these limitations it dooms itself to using its power in an evil way, as in the example given in the previous paragraph.

  

I offer the above as grounds for continuing the Socratic tradition of not trusting the experts.   Modern science, for the reasons given, is cause for regarding today’s experts as being less reliable than those of Socrates’ day, not more.  

 

Someone may, however, object that this does not apply to the medical experts we are being told to trust today because their science is devoted to the end of saving people’s lives and health and that this ensures that medical science cannot serve evil ends like the science that went into creating the nuclear bomb.   The response that jumps to mind is to point to all the harm and destruction done – small businesses going bankrupt, massive job losses, mental health breakdowns, alcohol, opioid and other addictions, suicides, the erosion of social capital, distrust of family, friends, neighbours, the development of a snitch culture, the trampling of basic freedom and constitutional rights, the cruel locking away of people in the last days of their lives from their loved ones, the brainwashing people into regarding such things as a friendly handshake or a warm hug as sources of contagion, the cancelling of weddings, birthday parties, holidays, and all the joys of life, forcing people to merely exist rather than truly live, etc. – by the lockdowns that so many of these medical experts have been demanding and imposing for the sake of preventing the spread of a disease that most often produces only mild symptoms, has over a 99 percent survival rate for those under 65-70 and in good health, and which poses a threat mostly to the very old and very sick.   Medical experts who would recommend such a thing demonstrate thereby that they are completely unworthy of our trust.

 

 

George Grant devoted his philosophical career to the contemplation of the significance of the transition from ancient to Modern thinking, focusing specifically on the shift from the view in which the permanent order of reality held us accountable to standards such as goodness, justice, and truth to the view in which the only “goodness”, “justice” and “truth” are values we impose on reality by bending it to our will.    He frequently quoted Robert Oppenheimer's statement "When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it" as encapsulating the thinking behind Modern technological science and showing why such thinking precluded bending and submitting to the order of the universe.   He contrasted this unfavourably with the old adage a posse ad esse non valet consequentia as epitomizing the older and wiser way of thinking.  He spoke and wrote frequently about the troubling paradox of freedom, wherein the prevalent liberalism of the Modern Age made freedom its highest value, but understood freedom as the unshackling of the will from the constraints of the order recognized by ancient wisdom, and in developing the science and technology necessary to so “free” the will as to make every desire attainable, created the conditions for unprecedented levels of social control that were eliminating freedom in the older sense of protected civil liberties and rights and ironically, in the name of freedom, were moving us closer to tyranny.   That medical science was as much a part of this problem as any other he recognized when he wrote:

 

 

The proliferating power of the medical profession illustrates our drive to new technologies of human nature.  This expanding power has generally been developed by people concerned with human betterment.

 

Yet nevertheless, the profession has become a chief instrument for tightening social control in the western world, as is made evident by the unity of the profession’s purpose with those of political administration and law enforcement, the complex organization of dependent professions it has gathered around itself, its taking over of the cure of the ‘psyche’, and the increasing correlation of psychiatry with a behaviourally and physiologically oriented psychology. It becomes increasingly necessary to adjust the masses to behave appropriately amidst such technological crises as those of population and pollution and life in the cities. (“Thinking About Technology”, in Technology and Justice, 1986, pp 16-17.

 

A Truly Stupid Move

 Suppose it was drawn to your attention that something you had done had adversely affected a large number of people.   It had not affected them all in the same way and to the same degree however.   Some of the people had been merely inconvenienced, others had been seriously injured.   Would it make sense to try to rectify this situation by taking further action to injure those who had merely been inconvenienced?

I would hope that your answer was no.   This is the sort of crazy move that ought to make sense only to socialists, egalitarians in general, or, to be somewhat redundant, madmen.   It appears, however, that it also makes sense to Brian Pallister, Premier of the province of Manitoba and to his Public Health Commissar Brent Roussin.   I don't know what, if any, political views Roussin holds, but Pallister is the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, which, should anyone think I have a partisan  motive in the strong criticism I have sent his way this year, is the closest thing that exists in Manitoba to something I would affirm as my own party.   This is not very close since my party would be fully and genuinely Tory rather than watered-down conservative and would be reactionary or anti-progressive rather than progressive.    Margaret Thatcher once told Brian Mulroney that he put too much emphasis on the adjective and not enough on the noun in his party's name.   While I agree with what the Iron Lady was saying, much as I hate to correct her this is an instance where her grammar was off.  In the name of the party both Progressive and Conservative are adjectives.  Party is the noun.   My point in bringing all of this up, however, is to say that this famous line also seems to apply to Pallister.   Perhaps it has something to do with the name Brian.   It is also true of Winnipeg city mayor Brian Bowman.

To properly explain what I mean by that we need to think back a month or two to when the cases of Chinese bat flu (Wuhan flu or Wuflu are also acceptable) started to rise in the province.   At the time Brent Roussin said that he would not impose another lockdown on the province.  He acknowledged, as even some officials of the Communist-dominated World Health Organization that first advised the lockdowns have done, that lockdowns do too much positive harm to be a viable strategy in combatting the spread of infectious disease.   As he has done many times in the past, however, Roussin has flip-flopped.   When the media began to hype the rise in case numbers, he began imposing restrictions, then piling restrictions upon the previous restrictions, each more ineffective than the last, until finally we were back under full provincial lockdown and a more severe one than the earlier to boot.   He has tried to disguise this by calling it other things than a lockdown.   While the rose of Shakespeare's Juliet may smell as sweet under any other name, the pungent stink of lockdown remains attached to Roussin's public health orders whatever he chooses to call them.

When he placed us back into lockdown, restaurants were forced to close their dining rooms again - the rapid approach of winter makes patios impractical - bars, theaters and gyms had to close, and small retailers of goods deemed "non-essential", except to the extent that they could provide curbside pickup and/or delivery, were ordered to close as well.

When this happened a number of small businesses complained -and rightly so - that this would drive them out of business.  They had not been able to fully recuperate from the previous lockdown, especially since, to be allowed to re-open, they had to strictly limit the number of people allowed inside and make all sorts of other changes, sometimes rather expensive ones.   These business owners drew attention to the fact that the big box stores which are part of large chains owned by mega-corporations, were allowed to remain open because they sold groceries and medicine and other "essentials" but they also sold the sort of things the small retailers that were ordered to close specialized in.   This, the small businesses argued, gave an unfair advantage to the larger stores which, unlike themselves, have the resources to survive a lockdown.   It has also been pointed out that Roussin's orders made no sense because someone is far more likely to catch the virus in a large supermarket than in a small store that in compliance with the previous, crippling, public health orders, could only allow a few people in at a time.

All of this was perfectly fair, reasonable and legitimate.   The government led by the phony Conservative Brian Pallister, however, decided to redress the situation, not by doing anything that would help the small stores, such as allowing them to remain open, but by taking a page from the book of Gretchen Whitmer, liberal Democrat Governor of Michigan, by telling the big stores that they could no longer sell "non-essential" goods.

There are two things wrong with this approach.

The first, which has already been stated but is worth repeating, is that this does nothing, absolutely nothing, to help the small stores which Roussin's evil public health orders - yes, they are evil - has so grievously injured by placing their solvency in jeopardy. Preventing other people from selling what they would  have sold if they were allowed to be open will not help them in any way to survive the month of forced closure.

The second problem with this whole approach is that the distinction between "essential" and "non-essential" is just as wrong and nonsensical when applied to goods and services as it is when applied to the businesses that sell them.   Government is not competent to decide for everybody what is "essential" and what is "non-essential".   While there are some basic needs that are common to all  people, the sum total of any given person's needs will differ from the sum total of the next person's needs, because people are different and have different needs.   Government is capable of identifying the common needs of all people, but not the specific needs of each and every person whom they govern.   Even a city's government would be incapable of this, much less the government of a province the size of Manitoba.   Ludwig von Mises' argument that centrally planned socialist economies cannot arrive at just prices for goods because they lack any mechanism, such as exists in the market, for accurately processing consumers' subjective preferences applies as much here as in its original context. (1)  All "one size fits all" decisions made by government and imposed on everyone are bad.   This is the lesson of the myth of Procrustes.   Pallister and Roussin would do well to study that ancient story and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s modern update, Harrison Bergeron, until they understand it.   

Pallister was interviewed on television a few days before the ban on "non-essential goods" which, coming as it does at this time of year, translates into a ban on Christmas shopping, perhaps as a prelude to an even Grinchier move, was announced.   In the snotty, arrogant, bullying tone of voice that has become all too common with him as of late, he lectured Manitobans that stores had been allowed to remain open so they could buy their groceries, not a new stereo system.   As grating as his hubris is - his whole stinking attitude of I am allowing these stores, which I am perfectly in my right closing, to stay open, so do as I say, you ingrates - there are those, probably many, who would be inclined to think that he has correctly distinguished between "essential" and "non-essential" here.   People cannot live without food - they can get by without stereos and other entertainment technology.   Such people, however, have not thought the matter through as thoroughly as it warrants.

The reasoning that groceries are "essential" because people cannot live without food, but entertainment technology is "non-essential" because we can survive without it, while it might be true under ordinary circumstances is invalidated by those of the lockdown.   Pallister has ordered everyone to stay home for a month.   He does not want them  socializing during that month.   Socializing outside of the immediate household has been forbidden.   All of the "third places" as Ray Oldenburg used the term - places other than home or work such as churches, coffee shops, libraries, etc. where people meet and socialize in a more relaxed, neutral atmosphere - have been closed.   There are many more people now than in previous times who live by themselves.    Under this combination of circumstances entertainment technology no longer seems so "non-essential".   Imagine someone who lives by himself, whose job has been deemed non-essential, who can no longer go to any of his regular haunts, and whose television breaks down the first day of lockdown.   With a month of lockdown ahead of him, he cannot replace the television because Pallister and Roussin, the people imposing these conditions on him, consider it to be "non-essential".

Rather than helping small businesses, all that Pallister's ban on the in-person selling of "non-essential" goods will accomplish will be to drive the entire market for such goods online.   If we think that saving small, family-owned, local businesses is a good things, which is one of the rare times when communitarians of the right, such as myself, and communitarians of the left, agree, this as a further step down the same wrong road in which huge, corporate owned, and unrooted chain retailers  represent an earlier step.   

The bottom line is that governments are not competent at deciding for each and every person what is "essential" and "non-essential" and ought not to try.   Socialists may think otherwise, but we have a socialist party in Manitoba already, the NDP, and we don't need the Conservatives following their example.   

If they really want to help the small stores they will lift this Satanic lockdown and allow those stores to re-open.

(1) See Mises' Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949) and Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922, English 1936).

What Respect for Freedom Does Not Look Like

 On Tuesday,  the 17th of November, Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister and the Mayor of the city of Winnipeg, Brian Bowman, both held press conferences.   In the course of their remarks both men stated that they respected what they called our democratic freedoms.   They each specifically mentioned the right to protest.   These statements of respect rang rather hollow, however, for they were contradicted by the overall tone and substance of their message.

Both men made reference to a protest that had taken place in Steinbach, a city about three-quarters to an hour's drive southeast of Winnipeg in what some call the province's "Bible belt", on Saturday the 14th of November.   The CBC, its supposedly private competitors such as CTV and Global, and the Winnipeg newspapers described the protest, as they generally do all protests of its type, as an "anti-mask" rally.   While not entirely inaccurate this is a misleading designation that trivializes the cause of the protesters by focusing on one small part, and that which would seem the least significant to most people, of what it is they find objectionable in the province's public health orders.   For it is those orders they are protesting and the way those orders treat our fundamental rights and freedoms as if they either do not exist or do not matter.

Take our basic freedoms of association, assembly, speech and religion.   These have been recognized as basic freedoms backed by prescription in the Common Law tradition of law and justice since before there was a Dominion of Canada.   That tradition, I remind you, together with our constitution of Westminster Parliament under royal monarchy, comprises the very foundation of our civil order.   They are also all specified as "fundamental freedoms" in the second section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.   Whatever the shortcomings of that document may be, and I have identified several over the years, designating these freedoms as fundamental is not one of them.

When public health orders state that we cannot meet in groups larger than five, that we must stand six feet apart from others at all times, and that we should limit our social contact to members of our immediate household -which on Thursday the 19th of November was changed from a should to a must - they clearly treat our "fundamental freedom" of association as being either non-existent or of no importance.   Eliminating the freedom altogether, as this aspect of the public health orders does, hardly constitutes a "reasonable" limitation, the only kind for which either the Common Law tradition or the Charter allow.

Public health orders that shut down all religious services, order all churches, synagogues and other faith communities to close and not meet together, and which effectively cancel important religious festivals, clearly do not respect our "fundamental freedom" of religion.   To drive home the significance of this allow me to elaborate on this point with an illustration.

Suppose that Brent Roussin, the province's chief health mandarin, had issued an order which singled out synagogues ordering them and only them to close.   Suppose that at the same time he cancelled Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Hanukkah, Purim and Passover, much as the Netanyahu government in the State of Israel actually did this year to the understandable outrage and fury of Orthodox Jews.   Suppose that he forbade the practice of Judaism as contrary to public health, banned circumcision, required all Jewish businesses to close and ordered all Jews to stay in their own homes.   Suppose he were to set up a snitch line, or "tip-line" as he would call it, and encouraged people to rat out any Jewish friends and neighbours who stepped slightly out of line, and hired a private police force to enforce all of these rules.

Does this hypothetical situation remind you of anything?

Who among us would fail to recognize in the above scenario the spitting image of the Third Reich's infamous anti-Semitic regime, sans the more violent and lethal aspects?

Yet the only change that needs to be made to translate this into Roussin's actual public health orders as they presently stand is to eliminate the specificity with regards to Jews and apply it to all faiths and religions alike.

Does this make it any better?

Think carefully about your answer.   To answer yes is to take the position that what was wrong with Hitler's treatment of the Jews was not that he persecuted them but that he singled them out and treated them differently from others rather thanpersecute everybody equally.   

Does that sound morally and intellectually defensible to you?

Sadly, there are a great many people who would recognize such a viewpoint as foolish and indefensible when stated as plainly as that, who nevertheless behave as if they actually thought that way. 

Clearly there is a lot more wrong with the public health orders than the mere fact that they require everybody to make fools of themselves by wearing diapers over their noses and mouths whenever they are in public.

This brings us to the fundamental freedoms of assembly and speech.   Freedom of assembly is similar to freedom of association, although the former implies a sense of organized purpose in meeting together that the latter does not.   The freedom of assembly, it should be stated, is freedom of peaceful assembly.    Organizing for rioting and other violent and criminal purposes is not protected by this freedom.   That having been said, what Pallister and Bowman meant by freedom to protest incorporates both freedom of assembly and freedom of speech.  It is the freedom to meet together to express mutual disagreement with and opposition to some government policy or action or, in some cases, the actions and policies of some non-government organization or group.

What could possibly be a more important expression of the freedom to protest and the freedoms of assembly and speech incorporated into it than to use it to protest the very actions of the government that treat these freedoms as well as the freedoms of association and religion as non-existent, irrelevant, and inconsequential?

Yet it is precisely protests of this sort which have Pallister and Bowman so livid.   Pallister attempted to square his condemnation of these specific protests with his professed respect of the freedom to protest by a) saying that the issue was the way in which the protest was conducted, i.e., "disrespectful", "unsafe" etc., and b) pointing to his defence of the right of earlier protesters who had protested outside his own home.  Presumably, with regards to the latter, he was thinking of those who decorated his yard as a cemetery for Halloween, erecting an effigy of him as the Grim Reaper, and blaming him for the deaths of everyone who had recently died of the bat flu because of his earlier efforts to re-open the economy.   This hardly seems more "respectful" than the Steinbach protest, and it is worth noting that however insulting to the premier the Halloween protesters were, they were not protesting against any expression of his governmental authority, but rather demanding that he flex his muscle more.   Could it be that the real issue is that Pallister is okay with the freedom to protest so long as the protest does not challenge or question the way he has exercised his authority?

Earlier this year Pallister and Bowman - and Roussin for that matter - all expressed their support for another kind of protest.   The contrast between that protest and the Steinbach one puts the lie to Pallister and Bowman's claims that the manner in which the latter protest was conducted was the issue.   This protest took place on the grounds of the provincial legislature in early June.   At the time, the province was still in the early stages of the re-opening from the first lockdown.   The protest in question involved thousands of people, much larger, sad to say, than any protest we have seen in this province against the trampling over our basic freedoms and rights, and social distancing and all the other petty rules, regulations and restrictions the rest of us were expected to follow were completely disregarded.   By the standards by which Roussin, Pallister and Bowman deem the Steinbach rally to have been "unsafe", this earlier protest was the most unsafe event that took place in Manitoba all year.   It did not, of course, result in a spike in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, despite being the very model of what the bat flu alarmists call a super-spreader, which totally debunks the supposed justification for returning us to lockdown now.   The event, by the way, was a racist event, an anti-white hate rally, thinly disguised, as anti-white hate rallies always are, as a protest against the very thing, racism that it epitomized.   At the time, protests of this sort were occurring all across the Western world, organized by the same anti-white hate groups, with a hardcore, far left, cultural Maoist ideology.   These protests, although called "peaceful" by the lying media, even when the very pictures they were broadcasting or publishing clearly contradicted that adjectival description, had a tendency to erupt into violent rioting, looting, assaults and vandalism.   In other words, precisely the sort of thing that is not protected by the freedom of peaceful assembly.   Pallister, Roussin, and Bowman offered not a word of criticism or condemnation., which is hardly surprising in Bowman's case as he has been publicly in bed with the anti-white hate movement, or anti-racist movement as he in his self-delusion likes to think of it, for years.   They reserved their harsh words for those whose much smaller rallies stood up for the constitutional and prescriptive civil rights and basic freedoms of all Manitobans, regardless of race, colour or creed.

The real issue here is Pallister, Bowman, and Roussin have all been deceived by what they thought was their success earlier this year.   Back in March, Pallister and Roussin ordered the province into lockdown before the virus had any significant presence here.   The lockdown they imposed was harsh and severe but it seemingly worked because we did not see community transmission, a rapid spike in cases, hospitalizations that came anywhere close to overloading the system, or more than a handful of deaths.  The strategy "worked" then because it caught the virus before it could spread in the community, but, despite the delusions of some to the contrary, the province could not be kept in lockdown indefinitely until a vaccine or some miracle cure could be found.   The lockdown was causing all sorts of problems of its own, far worse than the virus, which has proven to be, as some including this writer knew back in March, far less lethal than the media then was and is hyping it to be.   The province had to re-open, it did re-open, and eventually, the virus began to spread through the community.   The lockdown to the extent that it could be said to have worked, worked only to delay the inevitable.   Once those numbers started climbing, Roussin began imposing restrictions.   What "worked" when the virus had not yet begun to spread in the province but was limited only to a few who had contracted it out-of-province, proved incapable of containing the spread of the virus.    Roussin, however, rather than admit that this strategy was not working, kept adding more restrictions and then more restrictions, until finally we arrived at the point where we are in a worse lockdown than in the spring and the harshest lockdown in the Dominion.   This has been a double failure on the part of Roussin and the government.   Not only is the targeted restrictions-enhanced restrictions-total shutdown strategy failing to contain the virus, Roussin by insisting upon this strategy, which even the World Health Organization that originally recommended it has since largely repudiated, has failed to admit the failure of the strategy and pursue other options.   This failure is further compounded and enhanced by the fact that if the earlier lockdown accomplished anything worthwhile, it was to buy us time to strengthen the hospital system so it could withstand the pressure of the large number of cases when the virus predictably began to spread, and to learn from the example of the personal care home crises in Upper and Lower Canada in April and May by making sure none of what went wrong there happened in our nursing homes here, neither of which, obviously, was done.    This colossal failure falls entirely into Roussin's lap and that of the government that continues to back him as he blames his own failure on ordinary Manitobans for wanting to salvage their small businesses and restaurants , to worship their God in accordance with His commandments and their consciences, and to be friends, family and neighbours to one another once again in a real way, and not in the grotesque mockery of the social distancing propaganda of "we are all in this together".

Pallister, unfortunately, has consistently supported Roussin in his scapegoating of ordinary Manitobans for his failures, and he has done so by bullying, hectoring, badgering, berating and threatening us.   The primary purpose of his speech last Tuesday, was to announce the new measures the province was taking to enforce the public health orders, as if the problem with the orders was a lack of enforcement rather than the fact that they don't work and do a whole lot of unnecessary harm.   |Apart from enhancing the powers of every by-law enforcement officer in the province, from meter maids to game wardens, he announced that the province was wasting a million dollars on a contract with a private security firm to help enforce the public health orders.   Why spend a million dollars on hospital beds, PPE, and hiring more nurses, when you can use it to establish a Gestapo or Stasi instead, turning the province into a police state.   Pallister told us that he needed us all to be on "Team Manitoba" which, in this context, sounded suspiciously like "dissent will not be tolerated", especially since he also advertised his snitch line and encouraged us to rat each other out, just as if he were running the kind of totalitarian government that turns the entire territory it governs into one big prison.

All of this is a giant leap from this country's traditional ordered freedom into something that is growing more and more like Communism.   No wonder people are protesting.

Has Captain Airhead Finally Learned to Count?

On Thursday evening, Captain Airhead, who sometimes goes by the nom de scène Justin Trudeau and whom we in the Dominion of Canada have, whether as a result of some voodoo spell by our enemies or as divine judgement for turning our backs on God, been cursed to have had as the Prime Minister of Her Majesty's government in Ottawa for the past five years, made a phone call to the provincial premiers.   Why they bothered to pick up remains a mystery.   Perhaps Caller-ID was temporarily down all over the country.

We know what Captain Airhead told the premiers because he himself broadcast it on Friday morning.   "One of the things that I did highlight is that our resources are not infinite at the federal government" he said.   We shall return to those words momentarily.  First, take note of the fact that this was in reference to the Chinese bat flu.   He gave as specific examples of the resources which he has newly discovered to be finite, support for contact tracing, PPE, military and the Red Cross.   The last mentioned seems odd in this context since, although the Red Cross has royal patronage here as in the United Kingdom and receives some government funding, it is, the last I checked, an international private charitable  organization and not a branch of government.   That is beside the point however.   Captain Airhead spoke of the Dominion government as being there to support the provinces in the pandemic but added "there is a threshold beyond which when the cases spike too much, we might have to make really difficult choices about where to deploy the limited resources we have."

That the resources available to the government are limited rather than infinite is a truth of which prior to this Captain Airhead has given no indication that he was aware.    

Does this mean that Captain Airhead has finally come to appreciate the austerity that he always denigrated and deplored in Stephen Harper's premiership?

Hardly.   It is a tactic to bully the provincial governments into imposing stricter, harsher, lockdowns.

"Controlling the virus now reduces the impossible decisions and choices we might have to make down the road" he went on to say.   The translation of this out of smooth, polished, political talk back into Airhead's native dialect is "I'm gonna make you an offer you can't refuse.  Take away everyone's basic freedoms now or I will be cutting you off of federal support."

That Captain Airhead has not had some sort of epiphany about the limits of government resources or even taken a crash course in basic arithmetic from Count von Count is evident from the basic contradiction in his message.

The contradiction is simply this: the kind of lockdowns that Captain Airhead wants the premiers to impose will only use up the government's limited resources faster.

In the prairie provinces, including my own Manitoba, we are seeing the hospitals and intensive care units fill up with bat flu patients.   This is not typical of most places experiencing the so-called "second wave" which generally has seen numbers of positive cases going up without a significant spike in people getting seriously sick.  In Manitoba, at least, this can be attributed to this being the province's first real wave.   We did not see our hospitals and ICUs fill up when other places did back in March and April.  The desire of public health officials, both Dominion and provincial, to impose a second lockdown on us, if we charitably albeit, perhaps, naively, attribute to them the most benign possible of motivations, comes from a concern that the hospitals and ICUs will be overwhelmed and the system will crash.    This is the drain on public resources that they wish to avoid and it will be such a drain to be sure.   

One problem with their reasoning is that the addition to public expenses that will be produced by the lockdown measures themselves will exceed any possible reduction of the expenses due to the hospital overload.   Lockdowns are insanely expensive.   Far more so than crashing the health care system.   If people are not allowed to open their businesses or go to their jobs because of government orders, the government must compensate them.   The Dominion government already ran a record deficit doing this in the earlier lockdown this year, driving our national debt burden to the point where the federal debt alone will exceed a trillion dollars by the end of the year.    Whatever stress on the health care system new lockdowns might relieve, and it is doubtful that it will provide any significant relief at all, it will not sufficiently reduce the demand on our resources represented by the hospital/ICU crisis itself to offset that which will be created by the lockdowns.

The other problem with the "we need to lockdown or we won't have the resources to deal with the outbreak" reasoning is that lockdowns don't just add to the public expenses enormously themselves.   They also attack the other side of the ledger by severely reducing public revenue.   Public revenue is derived from taxes and it is the economy which generates the wealth that pays those taxes.   Lockdowns, however, are economy killers.   Businesses deemed "essential" are allowed to be open but at severely reduced capacities, currently 25% in Manitoba.   Retailers and restaurants classified as "non-essential" are allowed curbside and delivery service only.   Everybody else must close.   However, the distinction between "essential" and "non-essential" is not legitimate.   People cannot survive without food although they as individuals can get along without television sets but it is the production of goods such as television sets that pays for the production of goods such as food.   The so-called "non-essential" part of the economy is what pays for the so-called "essential" part and you cannot shut down the former without endangering the latter and severely reducing the source of public revenue causing the government to go further into debt (printing more money is merely a way of disguising the debt for the new inflated currency is now backed by wealth produced in the future, i.e., debt, rather than wealth that has already been produced). (1)

So no, Captain Airhead has not learned how to count.   He is simply doing what he always does, exercising his freedom-hating, totalitarian muscle, from behind his "sunny ways" mask.

(1) Should anyone object that it is a case of "lives" versus "the economy" I have shown many times in the past that this is a false dilemma.   Lockdowns kill.  While there has not been a whole lot of excess mortality this year compared to the immediately previous years, certainly not as much as one would expect from all the grims and alarmings and shockings the lying newsmedia use to describe the Chinese bat flu, there has been a lot of excess suicides, people drinking themselves to death, deaths by drug overdoses, and every other source of death one would expect to arise as the result of increased loneliness.   Lockdowns, not the virus, are the bigger killer this year.