This Thursday I told the House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research (SRSR to insiders) to avoid getting distracted by issues like refining the criteria for federal funding of advanced research and instead to focus their limited resources including of time on core government responsibilities such as defence, infrastructure and justice that appear to be crumbling. Ironically my initial in-person appearance on Tuesday collapsed because they couldn’t make the translation work, which I thought rather proved my point about the state being overextended and lacking some fairly basic capacities. I think the concept of government doing less baffled many of the MPs. But you can watch my testimony given Thursday via videoconference starting at timecode 16:11:33 and judge for yourselves.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say that Members of Parliament need to be focused on the core, and crumbling, functions of government rather than getting distracted by exotica like advanced research criteria. The state can’t and shouldn’t do everything, and at the moment it’s not doing much of anything properly in Canada, so worry about the tax code not the genetic code, defence not dark matter, and deficits not dilithium. (It’s based on testimony I’m giving before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research on December 10.)
In my latest Epoch Times column I comment on the curious absence, at the just-concluded and disastrously failed COP29 climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, of any meaningful discussion of science.
At COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan I spoke with Alex Newman of the New American about the dangerous idealism of the delegates.
“To be considered stupid and to be told so is more painful than being called gluttonous, mendacious, violent, lascivious, lazy, cowardly: every weakness, every vice, has found its defenders, its rhetoric, its ennoblement and exaltation, but stupidity hasn’t.”
Primo Levi, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail Feb. 25, 2004
“all scientific knowledge ‘depends upon the validity of reasoning.’ The reasoning of a person in a psychologically irrational state lacks validity and tends to be open to doubt by others. On this basis, Lewis proposed a rule: ‘No thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes.’”
Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis [describing Lewis’s reasoning in Miracles and quoting it].
In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that our politicians are dangerously helpless in the face of explicit support for antisemitic terrorism not from active malevolence but because it’s a form of evil their woke “paradigm” or worldview can’t process… yet.
“It was not the use of science that bothered [C.S.] Lewis but its misuse. The danger lay not with the sciences but with the humanities, which had fallen to pieces after World War I and abandoned their function in preserving the concepts of right, wrong, true, false, and beautiful. Poetry no longer made sense, music no longer had melodies, novels no longer had plots, paintings no longer were pictures, and the vast public ceased to be interested in the arts.”
Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis