In my latest Epoch Times column I say a small news item about overfishing squid actually speaks volumes about what’s wrong with the world today and with how we think about it, especially government.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I advocate thinking about things you don’t want to think about, from Putin’s motives to Xi Jinping’s ideology to James Burnham’s warning about the “Suicide of the West”.
“I think we all have a need to know what we do not need to know.”
William Safire, quoted in Federalist Patriot No. 04-38 22 September 2004 (from Federalist.com)
“If it came as a surprise to Khrushchev, why wouldn’t it come as a surprise to me?”
Soviet scholar Adam Ulam when asked why he didn’t predict Khrushchev's downfall in 1964, quoted in Globe & Mail April 1, 2000
“There is nothing more frightening than ignorance in action.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in “Quote of the Week in “The Week That Was: 2011-11-20” on Watt’s Up With That (https://wattsupwiththat.com)
“This means open war between men, in which everyone is obliged to take sides, either with the dogmatists or with the sceptics, because anyone who imagines he can stay neutral is a sceptic par excellence.”
Blaise Pascal Pensées
“just as historians tell us that Richard I was not fit to fill the shoes of bold Henry II – and that Richard Cromwell was not fit to wear the mantle of his uncle – they might add in future years that Richard Nixon did not measure to the footsteps of Dwight D. Eisenhower.”
John F. Kennedy’s nomination acceptance speech July 16, 1960 (the irony being that the metaphor only works if we have some idea who these people were, yet JFK didn’t realize Richard “Tumble-Down Dick” Cromwell was not Oliver’s nephew but his son, or that Oliver Cromwell’s “mantle” is not something you would want to have fit you).
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the real danger facing Canada isn’t tyranny but anarchy, with governments full of meddlesome ambition so lost in make-believe they freeze facing real-world problems.