"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
"Hey, I’m not a Pollyanna about the way the world works. Not all the turtles are going to make it to the ocean. That’s not negativism. That’s pragmatism." Dennis Miller The Rants
"Victims can be victims and not be innocent." David Rieff, A Bed for the Night (header quotation on Chapter 2 of Carol Off The Ghosts of Medak Pocket)
"It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious." A.N. Whitehead
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.