This Friday I'll be in Calgary at the Essentials of Freedom conference organized by my friend Danny Hozack. If you're in the area please join Danny, me, Brian Lilley, Mark Milke and others to talk about what's going wrong and how to get it right again. Including (but you saw this coming) a discussion of Magna Carta and our upcoming documentary funded through Kickstarter.
In my latest Rebel Media piece I ask why government is teaching kids about sex at all. Instead of debating what's in the state school curriculum, we should be debating state schools. John Stuart Mill said in On Liberty that the government should require parents to educate children, and make sure they could afford to, but should not deliver it because
A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation, in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.
How right he was.
John Ivison in the National Post laments how Parliament is ceasing to control executive branch spending as a departure from the principle of individual freedom from arbitrary government.
See my latest thoughts on the Greek financial crisis on the IRPP's Policy Options blog here.
With the temperature a balmy -8 outside here in Ottawa, shortly to ease down to -19, I’m catching up on my NBC news feeds. It’s not pleasant. I’m encountering subject lines (story headlines don’t always match the email teaser) like “15 Dead, Records Obliterated as Brutal Cold Hits U.S.” (with Chicago having its coldest morning in 79 years) and “So Cold You Can Hear Ice Crack, Hammer Nail with a Banana?”. People are doing their best to cope, hence “’Frozen’ Queen Elsa Is a Wanted Woman in Kentucky” (the police in Harlan, Kentucky haven’t lost their sense of humour) and “#ItsSoCold: Your Best Posts About the Deep Freeze”. But it’s a serious business. People have died. “U.S. Economy Could Take $5 Billion Hit From Brutal Winter Weather”. And it’s not over yet. “Record-Shattering Cold Tightens Grip Across U.S.” and “More Brrr! 'Siberian Express' Drags On Into Next Week” with another winter storm coming.
So of course NBC also ran a piece on how cold weather reduces crime, naturally saying that researchers are “driven by a desire to understand what the world will look like as global temperatures rise. They've all found good reason to believe crime, and social disorder, could increase.”
No matter how obvious it is that it’s incredibly cold, the story is that it’s incredibly warm. This, I gather, is called evidence-based decision making.
Meanwhile my Sun Media colleague Lorne Gunter offers the absurd notion that what warms the earth is indeed Mr. Sun and not the local factory or SUV. I mean seriously, what’s the sun, other than a gigantic blazing hot nuclear reaction that showers earth with energy, and whose quiet spells reliably correspond with unpleasantly cold spells?
No no no. If parts of Niagara Falls are frozen, they’re probably just oil-company funded “deniers” who go on about the Maunder Minimum and other things journalists who say the science is a lock don’t know about. It’s hot out there.
I mean, who are you going to believe, alarmists or your own fingers and toes? Come off it.
Sun News Network has set. It is a bittersweet feeling. Click here to read the rest.
Sometimes you have to be grateful for small mercies. Like when the Ontario government takes a big, mysterious loss on its bailout stake in General Motors and you think “Man, that could have been a lot worse.” Click here to read the rest.
What happens when voters reject reality? Let’s all watch Greece and find out… because we might be next. Click here to read the rest.