In my latest National Post column I say the search for life in space is boooring because only life with photosynthesis is interesting and even if we find it, which seems highly unlikely, it won’t solve any of our moral or even technological problems here on Earth.
In my latest Epoch Times column I ask Erin O’Toole to consider just how far Canada has moved left politically and indeed culturally and intellectually in recent years, and whether he thinks this massive swing is good, bad or mixed, before deciding what he’d like to do about it.
“If all decorum, discipline, and subordination are to be destroyed, and universal Pyrrhonism, anarchy, and insecurity of property are to be introduced, nations will soon wish their books in ashes, seek for darkness and ignorance, superstition and fanaticism, as blessings, and follow the standard of the first mad despot, who, with the enthusiasm of another Mahomet, will endeavor to obtain them.”
John Adams, quoted in Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind
“In opposition to his enervated gang of outcast wrecks you are able to marshal the flower and strength of all Italy.”
Cicero Selected Political Speeches [referring on the one hand to Catalina and on the other to the people of Rome]
In my latest National Post column I say people who want a government strategy for every problem lack faith in the creativity and decency of human beings especially including Canadians.
“As a profession, we have made a mess of things. It seems to me that this failure of economics to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with our general propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences, an attempt which in our field may lead to serious error…. If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire that full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible.”
Friedrich Hayek in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize in Economics, quoted in Brian Lee Crowley The Road to Equity