In my latest Epoch Times column I unearth and reprint a set of principles I outlined when the 21st century was young and fresh to guide is through an uncertain future, and claim that I have been largely vindicated. I also challenge my fellow pundits to do likewise (and scoff at politicians’ forecasts) because I say you should listen to the person who gets it right not the one who offers soothing but inaccurate platitudes.

“No one could possibly imagine that the Last Supper would be singled out for such grotesque disparagement as it was in Paris last week by people who actually believed that the central figure in the Last Supper really was whipped almost to death and nailed upon a cross until he died. No one, no matter how depraved or degraded, could possibly find such a horrible event remotely amusing. The agreeable aspect of it, the ‘fun’ that our media detected in it, was the pitifully adolescent thrill of a send-up of a starkly mortifying event that more than a billion people unselfconsciously consider to have been one of the most notable encounters there has ever been between man and his Creator. The thrill and the fun are to be found in rendering repulsive and perverted an occasion that a vast number of worthy and in very many cases, exceptionally accomplished and intellectually sophisticated people regard as a sacred moment when the divinely inspired missionary of the deity was among us and about to make an overwhelming sacrifice for the moral betterment of mankind. It is intellectual vandalism, iconoclastic churlishness, like the young mountebank Mussolini looking heavenwards like King Lear and bellowing to an appreciative crowd ‘I say you don’t exist; if you do strike me down, God.’ (Possibly the Duce remembered this as he and his mistress were executed by communist guerrillas prior to being hung upside down by their ankles and their corpses desecrated in a gas station in Milan in April 1945.)”

Conrad Black in National Post August 3, 2024

“There has been, as every informed Canadians knows, an avalanche of ludicrous judicial decisions, and the Supreme Court of Canada, because of inappropriate appointments to it from successive prime ministers, has become an almost constant source of absurd judgments. In one case a few years ago, the high court determined that the Charter’s right of assembly guaranteed the right of employees of the government of Saskatchewan performing essential work to strike. The upper courts have allowed judges to make an incoherent smorgasbord of our laws, with a shrinking number of reliable precedents and highly idiosyncratic lower court interpretations that pay no attention to the normal meaning of the language or intention of the legislators. This means that when the courts have finished, the legislators haven’t been legislating at all-just putting forth thoughts for the delectation of the bench. But even more sinister, the courts as a whole have followed the legislators into complete abdication in allowing the administrative state to function as it wishes without any apparent reference whatever to the text of law. In the case of Jordan Peterson, his freedom of expression counts for nothing in the face of churlish and self-righteous students or even a few frequenters of the Internet.”

Conrad Black in National Post August 17, 2024

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the recent flurry of federal government press releases boasting of handouts, virtually none of which had to do with strengthening national security or reducing taxes and red tape, expose the hollowness of their supposed change of heart in the face of a trade war.

In my latest Epoch Times column I urge candidates in the upcoming federal election, between bouts of mud-slinging, to take a firm stand on things government cannot do, should not do or both.

“The only way to end a quarrel is to get on both sides of it. We must have not merely a calm impartiality, but rather a sympathy with partiality as it exists in both partisans. We must be not so much impartial as partial to both sides.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News June 25, 1932, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)

“As I’ve written here before, Charles de Gaulle resolved the long struggle between the monarchists and the republicans by creating a monarchy and calling it a republic. The French president retains extensive powers, regardless of the composition of the country’s Senate and National Assembly.”

Conrad Black in National Post July 13, 2024

“There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.”

Archie Goodwin’s internal monologue in Rex Stout Death of a Doxy [setup for admitting he made one up to do with murders].