“any religion that does not say that God is hidden is not true, and any religion which does not explain why does not instruct. Ours does both.”

Pascal Pensées

“Speaking fluently and clearly will be put at the heart of the national curriculum and given the same status as literacy and numeracy under a Labour government, Sir Keir Starmer has pledged. In an article for The Times the Labour leader says that the ‘almost exclusive’ focus on reading and writing at present is ‘short-sighted’ as he calls for oracy to be given priority at every level of a child’s education.”

The Times July 5, 2023 [the teaser referred to “oracy” and I went to scoff but stayed to listen]

“I do not find myself often agreeing with the late Lord Keynes, but he has never said a truer thing than when he wrote, on a subject on which his own experience has singularly qualified him to speak, that ‘the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new ideas after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply are not likely to be the newest. But soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good and evil.’”

Friedrich Hayek “‘Free’ Enterprise and Competitive Order” in Individualism and Economic Order

“One of the most famous English-language commentators in the 20th century, Malcolm Muggeridge, famously referred to ‘the great liberal death wish.’ In Canada, we could correctly call it the great Liberal death wish.”

Conrad Black in National Post Feb. 10, 2024 [roasting Justin Trudeau].

In my latest Epoch Times column I ask where the campus protests and encampments are over dreadful treatment of women and gays under in Afghanistan… even if you don’t get to blame Jews.

In my latest National Post column I warn that because ideas have consequences, and a powerful internal logic, progressive organizations that start with apparently non-controversial causes tend to slide into radical craziness, as with Ottawa’s Capital Pride that’s being boycotted even by Justin Trudeau because it’s so pro-Hamas and can’t stop itself.

“When it [Queen’s University] opened its first classes in 1842, its first professor, the Reverend Peter Colin Campbell, taught classical literature. In its Memorial Room to the school’s war dead, there is an inscription around the wall, from Wordsworth, another provocative conditional: ‘We must be free or die, who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold which Milton held.’”

Joseph Brean in National Post January 26, 2024 [heckling the way Queen’s was handling its funding crisis].

“A dreadful rumour as to an engagement which had been one of its [some party’s] accursed fruits tormented me with the fresh certainty that I had not been missed, and bred in me that most desolating brand of cynicism which is produced by defeat through insignificance.”

Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands