James “Madison was the Father of the Constitution, Architect of the Bill of Rights, and the only Secretary of State never to have left the country. The oldest of 12 children, he could read and write in seven languages. He attended the College of New Jersey (which became Princeton) instead of William and Mary – where Jefferson went and got all those Scottish Enlightenment Ideas.”
Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)
In my latest Epoch Times column I urge people to put aside small-minded, defeatist, timid claims that practically speaking Canada can only have the bad muddled policies it currently does, and write down what they really think is wrong and what they really think would fix it.
In my latest National Post column I discuss the very good reason Israelis made a very bad deal.
“Without freedom of speech, we would not know who the idiots are.”
Emailed without attribution by a friend May 28, 2024
In my latest Mercatornet piece I say lurid claims that 2024 was the “hottest year ever” are ignorant bunk, while more restrained assertions that it was the hottest or second-hottest since 1880 depend on hocus-pocus about how accurately such things are measured, and were.
“We all know the story of how Herod, alarmed at some rumour of mysterious rival, remembered the wild gesture of the capricious despots of Asia and ordered a massacre of suspects of the new generation of the populace. Everyone knows the story; but not everyone has perhaps noted its place in the story of the strange religions of man. Not everybody has seen the significance even of its very contrast with the Corinthian columns and Roman pavement of that conquered and superficially civilised world. Only, as the purpose in his dark spirit began to show and shine in the eyes of the Idumean, a seer might perhaps have seen something like a great grey ghost that looked over his shoulder; have seen behind him filling the dome of night and hovering for the last time over history, that vast and fearful face that was Moloch of the Carthaginians; awaiting his last tribute from a ruler of the races of Shem. The demons also, in that first festival of Christmas, feasted after their own fashion.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The God in the Cave” in The Everlasting Man, quoted in “GKC on Scripture • Conducted by Peter Floriani” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023).
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the Governor General was very wrong to prorogue Parliament on behalf of a First Minister who had clearly lost the confidence of the House of Commons, and that the House should reconvene itself and fire Justin Trudeau.
C.S. “Lewis grew more outspoken in his criticism of the government in his letters to his American benefactors as the Argentine crisis grew and meat became even more scarce. He chaffed against government interference of the most paternalistic style. In the face of severe food for shortages, one government minister insisted that things were much better under government rationing. Whereas families once bought the kinds of foods they liked, under rationing they were forced to eat ‘a properly balanced diet’ by government standards. He commented to [Vera] Matthews that it might do the country good to see a few government ministers ‘dangling from a lamppost in Whitehall’. When the government realized that people were ordering groceries from Ireland, the Customs officials stopped the practice.”
Harry Lee Poe The Completion of C.S. Lewis [showing that there’s nothing like actual experience of living under patronizing big government to turn someone vaguely leftist by cultural disposition into a raging libertarian]