“Leaders have two characteristics: (1) they are going somewhere; (2) they can persuade others to go with them.”
D.P. Diffiné, “The 1993 American Incentive System Almanac”.
"the one perfectly divine thing, the one glimpse of God’s paradise given on earth, is to fight a losing battle – and not lose it."
G.K. Chesterton "Time’s Abstract and Brief Chronicle" according to Dale Ahlquist. It was paraphrased by Kara Kelley in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #5 (March-April 2005) as "The most romantic thing in the world is to fight a losing battle, and not lose." Which is almost the only case I know of where somebody rephrased Chesterton and may have improved him.
In my latest National Post column I call the willingness even of a sizeable minority of Britons to vote for a Labour Party headed by the appalling Jeremy Corbyn a worrying sign of loss of the self-control on which self-government depends throughout the Western world.
"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
"First, incentives matter to all human behaviour.... Like it or not, individuals will undertake more of an activity if the costs of that activity are reduced; this holds as much for bureaucrats as it does for profit-maximizing owners of firms." Terry L. Anderson and Donald R. Leal, Free Market Environmentalism
In my latest National Post column I argue that forbidding "cultural appropriation" would stifle dialogue and sympathy.
In my latest column for the National Post, I say FBI director James Comey had to be fired for his series of bizarre missteps and flipflops on Hillary Clinton's email.