A remarkable piece by Glenn Stanton on MercatorNet asks whether the puzzlingly high pregnancy rate among lesbians (yes, you read that correctly) doesn't call modern sexual orthodoxy into serious question.
"Suddenly it becomes evident that things which for thousands of years the human imagination had banished to a realm beyond human competence can be manufacture right here on earth, that Hell and Purgatory, and even a shadow of their perpetual duration, can be established by the most modern methods of destruction and therapy. To these people (and they are more numerous in any large city than we like to admit) the totalitarian hell proves only that the power of man is greater than they ever dared to think, and that man can realize hellish fantasies without making the sky fall or the earth open…. Nothing perhaps distinguishes modern masses as radically from those of previous centuries as the loss of faith in a Last Judgement: the worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope." Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, with specific reference to film footage from Nazi concentration camps
Yahoo! The Kickstarter campaign has closed and The Environment: A True Story is funded. Thanks to everyone who made it happen. I'll keep people posted as the production process unfolds. And if you meant to contribute but didn't get to it, I'm still happy to accept support by cheque or via PayPal; email me for details. But for now, a great big thank you to all our backers. I literally can't do it without you.
In my latest National Post column I argue, despite generally opposing efforts to remake the world in our image, that in situations as bad as Syria our common humanity obliges us to act.
On the eve of tomorrow's anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge it's good to see so much remembrance including the outstanding front portion of today's National Post. It was a pivotal Allied victory in the First World War partly for strategic reasons, partly for tactical ones and partly for psychological ones given how bleak things looked in the spring of 1917. It wasn't just important for Canada's sense of nationhood. The First World War, for all its horrors, was a necessary struggle for freedom and it was very important that the Allies won even if the victory was in significant measure squandered over the next two decades.
A reminder as the anniversary approaches that my documentary The Great War Remembered, which tries to explain and also to vindicate the war despite everything, is available free on YouTube.
In my latest National Post column I question the coincidence of Jordan Peterson being suddenly refused a federal government grant after he questioned radical gender orthodoxy.
"Shortly before his death in the 1920s, Mr. [former French Premier Georges] Clemenceau discussed the question of guilt over the [First World] war’s outbreak with a representative of Germany’s Weimar Republic. 'What, in your opinion, will future historians think of this controversial issue?' the representative asked. 'This I do not know,' Mr. Clemenceau replied. 'But I know for certain that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany.'" Letter from David Dear, Edmonton, in Globe & Mail July 23 1996
"We think of economics as strangled in math because of the formulas and graphs filling most economics textbooks. But you can (and I did) search the entire founding volume of economics, Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, without encountering a mathematical formula. In New Ideas, Buchholz quotes Alfred Marshall, the preeminent economist of the late nineteenth century (and a mathematician): '(1) Use mathematics as a shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them until you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life. (5) Burn the mathematics.'" P.J. O’Rourke Eat the Rich