“Of his eighteen years as emperor Septimius gave twelve to war. He destroyed his rivals in a swift and savage campaigns; he razed Byzantium after four years’ siege, thereby lowering the barrier to the spreading Goths; he invaded Parthia, took Ctesiphon, annexed Mesopotamia, and hastened the fall of the Arsacid kings. In his old age, suffering from gout but fretful lest his army deteriorate through five years of peace, he led an expedition into Caledonia. After expensive victories against the Scots he withdrew into Britain, and retired to York to die (211). ‘I have been everything,’ he said, ‘and it is worth nothing.’”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

In my latest appearance on Rebel News I discuss Prime Minister Mark Carney’s decision to embrace evil in the Middle East with Ezra Levant.

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say Mark Carney’s decision to side with Hamas was a classic example of political rhetoric that was meaningless, dishonest and sinister at once.

“The flexibility of the ius gentium facilitated the transmission of Roman law to medieval and modern states. It was a happy accident that while the chaos of barbarian invasion was mutilating the legal heritage in the West, the Code, Digest, and Institutes of Justinian were collected and formulated in Constantinople, in the comparative security and continuity of the Empire in the East. Through these labours, and a hundred lesser channels, and the silent tenacity of useful ways, Roman law entered into the canon law of the medieval Church, inspired the thinkers of the Renaissance, and became the basic law of Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, even – within the British Empire – of Scotland, Quebec, Ceylon, and South Africa. English law itself, the only legal edifice of comparable scope, took its rules of equity, admiralty, guardianship, and bequests from Roman canon law. Greek science and philosophy, Judeo-Greek Christianity, Greco-Roman democracy, Roman law – these are supreme inheritance from the ancient world.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“Once you grasp >95% of MPs are NPCs…”

Dominic Cummings on X Dec. 19, 2024 [https://x.com/Dominic2306/status/1869756643208286355] [specifically re the British Parliament].

“To [the Marquis de] Sade, of course, it had all been folly. There was no brotherhood of man; there was no duty owed by the weak to the strong. Evangelicals, like Jacobins, were the dupes of their shared inheritance: their belief in progress; their conviction in the potential of reform; their faith in humanity might be brought to light. Yet it was precisely this kinship, this synergy, that enabled Castlereagh, faced by the obduracy of his fellow foreign ministers, to craft a compromise that was, in every sense of the word, enlightened. Unable to force through an explicit outlawing of the slave trade, he settled instead for something at once more nebulous and more far-reaching. On 8 February 1815, eight powers in Europe signed up to a momentous declaration. Slavery, it stated, was ‘repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality’. The language of evangelical Protestantism was fused with that of the French Revolution. Napoleon, slipping his place of exile three weeks after the declaration had been signed, and looking to rally international support for his return, had no hesitation in proclaiming his support for the declaration. That June, in the great battle outside Brussels that terminally ended his ambitions, both sides were agreed that slavery, as an institution, was an abomination. The twin traditions of Britain and France, of Benjamin Lay and Voltaire, of enthusiasts for the Spirit and enthusiasts for reason, had joined in amity even before the first cannon was fired at Waterloo. The irony was one that neither Protestants nor atheists cared to dwell upon: that an age of enlightenment and revolution had served to establish as international law a principle that derived from the depths of the Catholic past. Increasingly, it was in the language of human rights that Europe would proclaim its values to the world.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that Musk’s flameout as a deficit and waste cutter reveals just how hard it is to rein in overspending, especially because people give so little thought to why it really happens.

“This growth of arbitrary government in our country is a very real thing. The power of the Censor is a strong example of it, but not necessarily even the strongest. Judicial equity has become more and more a question of the judge and less and less a question of the statute. The very phrase ‘judge-made law’ either means nothing or it means personal despotism. If anyone said ‘King-made law’ we should start. The very importance of the legal mind is an instance; for lawyers necessarily thrive upon the absence of law.”

G.K. Chesterton quoted, without further attribution, in “News with Views” (“compiled by Mark Pilon”) in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)