In my latest Epoch Times column I say the only thing our Prime Minister knows about a “business case” for exporting LNG to Europe is that he’s going to make sure it stays closed.
“Few are presumptuous enough to dispute with a chemist or mathematician upon points connected with the studies of labour of his life. But almost any man who can read and write feels at liberty to form and maintain opinions of his own upon trade and money …. The economic literature of every succeeding year embraces works conceived in the true scientific spirit, and works exhibiting the most vulgar ignorance of economic history and the most flagrant contempt for the conditions of economic investigation. It is much as if astrology were being pursued side by side with astronomy or alchemy with chemistry.”
Gen. Francis A. Walker, a professor at Yale and later president of M.I.T., quoted by Milton Friedman in CATO Policy Report Vol. XXI No. 2; another source on which my notes are culpably incomplete calls him “probably the most famous American economist of the nineteenth century” and director of two national censuses, which latter claim Wikipedia confirms, adding that he was wounded at Chancellorsville, fought in other battles, became a POW, was made a brevet brigadier general at age 24, and went on to a series of other achievements that make one wonder what one has done with one’s own life.
“there are aspects of our experience which hint at an incompleteness in what we are and that encourage the expectation of a fulfilment whose ground could only be in something or someone other than ourselves. Peter Berger has drawn our attention to ‘signals of transcendence’ found in every life: (a) an argument from order (essentially the intuition that history is not a tale told by an idiot; the parental role of comforting a frightened child is not the acting of a loving lie); (b) an argument from play (cheerfulness, not to say joy, keeps breaking in); (c) an argument from hope (something is held to lie in the future which is necessary to the completion of the present); (d) an argument from damnation (our outrage at Hitler and Stalin is an intuition of the transcendent moral seriousness of the world); (e) an argument from humour (there is a perceived incongruity in our experience which ‘reflects the imprisonment of the human spirit in the world’). I would want to add to these an argument from mathematics. The nature of that subject is a hotly disputed philosophical question, but for many of its practitioners its pursuit has the character of discovery rather than construction. They would agree with St Augustine that ‘men do not criticise it like examiners but rejoice in it like discoverers’. Here is the intimation of an independent world of everlasting truth which we are able to explore.”
John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
“The nice thing about life is that you never know what is going to happen next. The problem with death is that you do know what is going to happen next. Nothing.”
Steve Bridge, a cryonics enthusiast, quoted in National Review September 2, 1996
In my latest Epoch Times column I say people arguing over whether government in Canada is “broken” should devise a checklist of the attributes of a genuinely broken government and then see how many of them we’ve got.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I draw on the wisdom of G.K. Chesterton to unravel the attitudes of populist and their opponents to accountability.
“The believers in miracles accept them because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them because they have a doctrine against them.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 6 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2003)
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the EU mandating that all devices use the USB-C standard is a classic case of thinking just because something is annoying government should blunder in and mandate a uniform solution to one of life’s complexities.