In my latest National Post column I say safe injection sites are too timid an answer to the harm done by the war on drugs.
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.
“All serious political and moral philosophy, and thus any serious social inquiry, must begin with an understanding of human nature. Though society and its institutions shape man, man’s nature sets limits on the kinds of societies we can have. Cicero said that the nature of law must be founded on the nature of man (a natura hominis discenda est natura juris).”
James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature
“I have read that ‘there is no justice until the sword creates it, establishes it, guarantees it, gives it substance and significance.’”
Bernita Harris, whose military family included a grandfather who fought in WWI, interviewed in Ottawa Citizen May 26, 2000