In my other speech to the Augustine College Summer Seminar in June, and again I apologize for the delay in getting it edited and posted, I talked about what classical Greece and Rome got right about political freedom and what they did not, how medieval England completed the picture with Magna Carta to limit government in theory and parliament to limit it in practice, and how and why things went wrong in the modern world.

Here’s a video from the past. It’s a talk I gave at the Augustine College Summer Seminar in June 2019 so I’m tardy making it available. And it’s about the Middle Ages which were, far too many people think, necessarily awful because they were long ago and old is bad and new is good. In fact there are a great many modern horrors that would have appalled people in the Middle Ages and one of them is widespread ignorance about the period.

Sorry to take so long to get around to editing and posting it. Life got in the way.

In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that there is no “international law” in matters like drone strikes on terrorists because there are no international police, no international courts with legitimate jurisdiction, no real international statutes and no international jails.

“The future is, of course, an illusion. Nothing has happened there yet.... Among Marshall McLuhan’s many intriguing metaphors, the most paradoxical one is his reference to ‘rearview mirror’ thinking. All of us, he said, are speeding along a highway with our eyes fixed on the rearview mirror… He believed that only a few avantgarde artists (and, of course, himself) were capable of looking through the windshield so that they might tell us where we are going. The irony here is that the windshield is also a rearview mirror of sorts, for whatever future we see is only – can only be – a projection of the past.... Imagined futures are always more about where we have been than where we are going.”

Start of author’s “Introduction” to Neil Postman Building a Bridge to the 18th Century

“the present era, by and large since the end of the First World War, has returned to the practice and theory of radical hedonism.... We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent - people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.”

Erich Fromm To Have and To Be p. xxvii.

“That's what's important, to feel useful in this old world, to hit a lick against what's wrong, or to say a word for what's right even though you get walloped for saying that word. Now I may sound like a Bible beater yelling up a revival at a river crossing camp meeting, but that don't change the truth none. There's right and there's wrong. You got to do one or the other. You do the one and you're living. You do the other and you may be walking around, but you're dead as a beaver hat.”

Davy Crockett (John Wayne) in The Alamo (according to en.wikiquote.org)

“in the seventeenth century, when men were just what they are now, except that they had no telephones nor airplanes.”

George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism