“Go back to the idea of government by ideas.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Revolt Against Ideas,” in The Thing, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #6 (4-5/07)
In my latest National Post column I observe that Chrystia Freeland shouldn’t be praised for quitting on principle, she was fired and then faked it.
He had many dinners alone with General George Marshall during the war, after “two stiff, bourbon old-fashioneds which the Chief liked to mix himself. There would be talk of course, but absolutely no war talk. That day he probably had had to make decisions that affected the fate of nations; tomorrow he would face problems equally crucial. But that evening he would be calm and unworried as he listened to my chatting. Once, I asked him how he stood up under the strain; he answered: ‘I’ve had to train myself never to worry about a decision once it’s made. You worry before you make it, but not after. You make the best judgement you can about a problem – then forget it. If you don’t, your mind is not fit to make the next decision.’”
Frank Capra The Name Above the Title
On Thursday on the Ezra Levant Show I discussed our dull-witted response to Trump’s ham-fisted joke about Canada as the 51st state, and Justin Trudeau’s broader incapacity to protect Canada’s national interests.
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.
“Kings needed help or counsel or money. They wanted assent to their policies and political support for them. These obvious facts should indeed receive due emphasis in any institutional history of the Middle Ages, but it is a delusion to suppose that, by merely calling attention to them, we are providing a sufficient explanation for the rise of medieval constitutionalism. The problem of maximizing assets to governmental policies arises for all rulers in all societies. It is not normally solved by the development of representative assemblies. Our argument is not that hard-headed medieval statesmen behaved in such-and-such a way because some theorist in a university had invented a theory saying that they ought to do so. The argument is rather that all men behave in certain ways in part at least because they adhere to certain ways of thinking. No doubt the ideas that are most influential in shaping actions are ones that the agent is hardly conscious of at all – he takes them so much for granted. But the historian has to make himself conscious of those ideas if he is to understand the men of a past age and the institutions that they created.”
Brian Tierney, “Medieval Canon Law and Western Constitutionalism,” in The Catholic Historical Review (Washington, April, 1966) excerpted in Bertie Wilkinson The Creation of Mediaeval Parliaments [and BTW Wilkinson was my grandfather].
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 Loonie Politics column I say the Canadian chattering classes’ lead-balloon response to Trump’s clumsy 51st-state joke was devoid of wit in any sense.