Posts in History
Wish I'd said that - May 31, 2017

"In their political arrangements, men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time. With regard to futurity, we are to treat it like a ward. We are not so to attempt an improvement of his fortune as to put the capital of his estate at risk." Edmund Burke An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs

Wish I'd said that - May 27, 2017

Lincoln County in the New Mexico Territory, in its Wild West days, was the kind of place "where a man would kill you just to see if a gun worked." TV documentary on the "Lincoln County War" famously involving Billy the Kid that aired in Ottawa on December 18, 1998 (as a pedantic rule I try to source my quotations as accurately as possible but sometimes all you get is all I scribbled down at the time)

Why terrorists attack pop concerts

In my latest National Post column I say the bombing of an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester should remind everyone, including progressives, that Islamist fanatics do not hate our open society for being repressive or for defending itself. They hate it because it is tolerant. They hate our permissiveness. They hate us for who we are not what we do. And there is nothing we can do to appease them that would not be a fundamental betrayal of ourselves and our ideals.