In my latest National Post column I ridicule McMaster University's policy of banning all smoking on campus, of anything, any way, as infantilizing and unscientific, two odd qualities for an institution of higher learning.
A great turnout for the grand opening of the Canadian Centre for Men and Families - Ottawa on Saturday. And a very nice piece in the Ottawa Citizen.
So thanks to everyone who came to the event, and to everyone who helped make it possible from donors to volunteers to staff. And if you know anyone in the Ottawa area who needs the services the CCMF-O is putting in place, from crisis counselling to support groups to legal issues to advice on fathering after divorce (or just in general) please refer them to the centre.
Queen Victoria: "You are a genius.” Pianist Vladimir de Pachmann: "Perhaps, Your Majesty, but before that I was a drudge."
Clifton Fadiman, ed, The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes
"Man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe."
Euripides, quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail April 17, 2013.
"The open mind is really a mark of foolishness, like an open mouth."
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Jim Hurlbert in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 # 7 (June 2004)
"To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge."
Confucius, anticipating Donald Rumsfeld, quoted in Henry David Thoreau Walden (Project Gutenberg edition)
"a young woman I met recently... went back to school and was taking a basic literacy course. After weeks of discouragement, she found herself one day – for the first time – able to help her seven year-old daughter with her homework. She said it made her believe that you should never be frightened to reach for the moon. Even if you miss, she said, you will be amongst the stars."
Lloyd Axworthy in a speech to the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen March 1995
My latest piece in MercatorNet, based on a speech to the Augustine College Summer Conference (and an earlier National Post column and upcoming Dorchester Review article) asks how a society as devoted to "choice" as our own can at the same time so relentlessly restrict choice.