In my latest National Post column I mock the notion of a geopolitical lightweight like our Prime Minister putting himself forward as an elder statesman.
“When Benjamin Franklin was seven years old... he fell in love with a whistle. He was so excited about it that he went into the toy shop, piled all his coppers on the counter, and demanded the whistle without even asking its price. ‘I then came home,’ he wrote to a friend 70 years later, ‘and went whistling all over the house, much pleased with my whistle.’ When his older brothers and sisters found out that he had paid far more for his whistle than he should have paid, they gave him the horse laugh; and, as he said: ‘I cried with vexation.’... But the lesson taught Franklin was cheap in the end. ‘As I grew up,’ he said, ‘and came into the world and observed the actions of men, I thought I met with many, very many, who gave too much for the whistle.’”
Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
On the Crown & Crozier podcast I discuss Magna Carta, church, state and you.
In my latest National Post column I say the unsuccessful experience with online learning during the pandemic is yet another argument for adopting a choice-driven, voucher/charter school educational system.
“The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.”
G.K. Chesterton What I Saw In America
“So prevailing is the disposition of man to quarrel and shed blood, so prone is he to divisions and parties, that even the ancient natives of this little spot [Nantucket Island] were separated into two communities, inveterately waging war against each other like the more powerful tribes of the continent…. Behold the singular destiny of the human kind, ever inferior in many instances to the more certain instinct of animals, among which the individuals of the same species are always friends, though reared in different climates…”
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur Letters from an American Farmer
“Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death.”
James Byrnes, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail August 7, 2007
On May 20 I discussed Israel, COVID, liberty and more with Richard Syrett on NewsTalk Sauga 960 AM.