In my latest Loonie Politics column I give thanks that Canada is blessed with sages capable of devising the brilliantly original solution to our health care crisis of spending tons more cash from Ottawa’s magic money tree.
“it is not probable that a man who is careless in small matters is careful in large ones; quite the contrary, a man who cannot even copy a sentence of Keynes’s correctly is not likely to be a reliable reporter of complicated or badly expressed ideas.”
George Stigler "On Scientific Writing” in The Intellectual and the Market Place and Other Essays [in support of a proposal that someone undertake a large-scale random verification of statements of empirical fact and of quotations from other writers in published economic articles]
In my latest National Post column I say the U.S. has entered a new political era in which it would promote healing if one side could admit there are very good reasons for people to support Donald Trump, for instance their distaste for identity politics, and the other side could admit Trump is an awful person and a nasty President.
“Religion is a form of indoctrination, which requires a considerable amount of literacy. You cannot get religion into people minus literacy. And as literacy weakens, people lose their religious affiliations.”
Marshall McLuhan “Violence as a Quest for Identity” (1977) in Marshall McLuhan Understanding Me
“There is no limit to the amount of nonsense one can produce if you think too long alone.”
Jacob Viner, quoted by Bernard J. Shapiro, Principal, McGill University, to the Empire Club of Canada, Toronto, May 22, 1997, in Canadian Speeches Vol. XI, #4 (July/August 1997)