In my latest National Post commentary, I argue that the Saudi-Iranian dispute shows once again that ideas matter. Petty preoccupations, personal failings, political and military misjudgements and ethnic resentments may all be part of the mix it’s driven by bitter theological quarrels that divide and inflame the Middle East as they have for millennia.

In my latest National Post column I join the Prince of Wales in his defense of Vacherin d’Abondance.

My friend Tom Harris is inviting people to attend a conference sponsored by his International Climate Science Coalition and others in Paris at the same time as the big UN affair. Even if you don't find yourself in Paris this coming week, it's well worth pondering the questions Tom and his colleagues are asking about the orthodox view. Most fundamentally, the ICSC and others ask for proper evidence on these three points:

• Recent climate change is unusual in comparison with historical records;
• Human emissions of carbon dioxide and other 'greenhouse gases' are dangerously impacting climate;
• Computer-based models are reliable indicators of future climate.

If the consensus is as solid as alarmists claim, it should be easy to provide. If they can't or won't provide it, something very unscientific is going on here.

In my latest National Post column I ask whether we have what we need to fight ISIL.

In an excruciatingly studied effort to show more passion on the campaign trail, Jeb Bush says he would have killed baby Hitler given the chance. Apparently the question is a thing these days thanks to New York Magazine, and Bush's response was a mild obscenity (wow, such authenticity) followed by "yeah, I would!" Phooey. If I might refer you to my Sept. 28 post on the apparent opportunity of Henry Tandey, VC, to shoot a wounded Hitler on September 28 1918, it's absurd to suppose that anyone could have known a corporal in the trenches of World War I would have turned into a successful genocidal warmongering maniac politician in the 1930s. It's not even a category into which that young soldier could fall.

As for the notion that you could identify a baby who would later certainly do great evil if you didn't slaughter it in its infant innocence, that you could determine scientifically its necessarily malignant influence on history and preemptively exterminate it with a clean conscience, let's leave that for Minority Report and stick with the fairly elementary fact that killing babies is wrong.

So is appeasing dictators, but that's a story for another decade.

As for politicians faking passion, it's always a sorry sight.

In my latest National Post column I explain that China's reversal on the one-child policy is a stunning intellectual event of the first importance.

Very interesting Washington Post piece about the security of the Internet and the "Internet of things" largely based on Linux, given the eccentricities of Linux' founder and the incentives that don't operate when people are giving stuff away rather than selling it. Read that alongside Ted Koppel's piece (in Thursday's National Post among other places) about the vulnerability of America's power infrastructure (and ours, I assure you) and you might well conclude with Woody that "This is the perfect time to panic."

But don't worry if you miss it. You'll get another chance.

In my latest video for the Rebel, I argue that when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia on August 20, 1968, and crushed the "Prague Spring", it provided a sobering reminder at the height of the counter-cultural revolution, that there was a crucial difference between the open societies of the West and their enemies abroad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMUgVdiouZI