The final episode of Reality University Podcast is up. It deals with one of the great heroes in the struggle for liberty, Sir Edward Coke.
My latest National Post column reminds people that freedom can't just mean the right to do what you're told, even by the majority.
For Rebel Media I say if you don't like the way public affairs are going, maybe you should write a novel. Harriet Beecher Stowe did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHZSAtNyvHQ
You can listen to my conversation with Andrew Lawton on AM980 about the Magna Carta project below; it starts at 39:47. https://soundcloud.com/am980/andrew-lawton-show-march-16th-2015
Read my latest column in the National Post rejecting the concept of "net neutrality".
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.
Barely a week after the latest bizarre Clinton scandal erupted, this time Hillary's inexplicable decision to use a private personal system for all her email while Secretary of State without telling anyone, a company in Connecticut has created a Hillary Clinton action figure complete with Blackberry. Some people find the general rowdiness of the United States, including its political system, off-putting. They prefer genteel stuffiness in which establishment boats are not rocked and pundits and statespersons are not mocked.
The U.S. political system certainly has its failings, some shared with other Western democracies including Canada and some unique to itself. But I think we need more of the wide-open, lively, dynamic American tone. Their political culture reacts faster, more pointedly and more frankly, letting in more air and making more room for honest expressions of public sentiment.
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.