“Antisemitism is both a sort of mental impairment and a barrier to learning. If you think that ‘the Jews’ control the banks, you don’t understand finance, and will never understand it because you have this happy conspiracy theory and you think you already know everything. If you think ‘the Jews’ control the weather with their space lasers, you’re not going to bother to study meteorological science. A society in which this kind of antisemitism is prevalent is not going to be a sign of a society on the cutting edge of science or business or economics or anything else. In our society, these beliefs are toxic. They’re terrible for Jews, but they are actually poison to what makes America, America.”

Walter Russell Mead in conversation with Bari Weiss on The Free Press October 31, 2023 [https://www.thefp.com/p/are-we-tipping-into-world-war-three].

In a talk to the Augustine College Summer Seminar I argued that the American Revolution brought liberty and prosperity because it looked back to the solid foundations of Magna Carta, Christianity and the Western tradition, while the French Revolution brought misery and death because it looked forward to a utopian future unconstrained by the past.

“We have been accused of hostility to the scientist, when we are merely hostile to the materialist.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News May 9, 1931, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 March-April 2022

In my latest Epoch Times column I complain that Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford subsidizing EV manufacturing in Canada are repeating very old economic mistakes in an unaffordable fog of smug ignorance.

“Why Japan Is Building Its Own Version of ChatGPT /Some Japanese researchers feel that AI systems trained on foreign languages cannot grasp the intricacies of Japanese language and culture”

Headline and deck on article in Scientific American September 15, 2023

“Some natural selection buffs claim that the human mind is just a meaningless and purposeless result of a process that did not have us in mind. Hold on a moment. If it were, then there would be no reason for confidence in any conclusion of reasoning whatsoever – including the conclusion that our minds are a meaningless and purposeless result of a process that did not have us in mind.”

J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” May 8, 2023 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/things-i-had-to-learn]

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the secretive bungling of basic security at the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg is a case study in complacent bad government in Canada.

In my latest Epoch Times column I complain about the ongoing, pervasive pattern in which Canadian courts agree that the state has violated our rights, then say what the heck, probably for the best, go fish.