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 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.
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].