In my latest Epoch Times column I ridicule the government for thinking the solution to the taxman riding roughshod over citizens’ rights is to get him bigger boots.
“no Roman citizen, as every reader of the Acts of the Apostles knows, could be scourged, tortured, or put to death over his appeal to the emperor.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ [and everyone knew it then, Christian or not, whereas nowadays I wouldn’t count on most state-educated people to understand any part of that sentence]
In my latest Epoch Times column I say Canadian authorities’ feeble justifications for cancelling concerts because they don’t like the singer or the lyrics show just how little they understand free speech… or even think about it.
In the Epoch Times I summarize my C2C Journal argument against photo radar and encourage everyone to fight these frivolous tickets. If they’re really a safety measure the state will happily spend more collecting them than it actually collects. But if they’re a cash grab that cost more than they rake in, it will stop. As it should.
In my latest C2C essay I explain why people hate photo radar: it’s a brazen violation of the rule of law and the social contract to fine citizens for normal behaviour.
“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
“Indeed, I think it [the turn to autocracy or worse because of the failings of democracy especially under “the Party System”] is part of the one big blunder that is at the back of all our blunders. It is hard to put it shortly, except by calling it the blunder of being Practical. Perhaps the nearest word is Opportunism; but it is not the sane opportunism that takes all opportunities to advance a great thing; it is the nervy and panicky opportunism that accepts all the small things because they have more opportunities. It is this yielding to the apparently practical that has ruined everything.”
G.K. Chesterton “The True Fascist Fallacy” reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)
“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].