“My dad wasn’t lazy, he just had a genius for not considering the future.”
Audie Murphy, quoted in Edward F. Murphy, Heroes of World War II
In my latest Epoch Times column I say people arguing over whether government in Canada is “broken” should devise a checklist of the attributes of a genuinely broken government and then see how many of them we’ve got.
In a Loonie Politics piece I should have posted a couple of weeks ago I say it would be instructive to look back at old newspapers to see what did get covered, and how, as opposed to what turned out to matter and why.
In my latest Epoch Times column I denounce the enduring capacity of politicians to be surprised by predictable developments and then unable to cope with them.
“As to fighting, keep out of it if you can, by all means. When the time comes, if it ever should, that you have to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to a challenge to fight, say ‘No’ if you can – only take care you make it clear to yourselves why you say ‘No.’ It’s a proof of the highest courage, if done from true Christian motives. It’s quite right and justifiable, if done from a simple aversion to physical pain and danger. But don’t say ‘No’ because you fear a licking, and say or think it’s because you fear God, for that’s neither Christian nor honest. And if you do fight, fight it out; and don’t give in while you can stand and see.”
Thomas Hughes Tom Brown’s Schooldays
In my latest National Post column I explain how anyone who actually wants to have a sensible conversation on guns not a shouting match, or a virtue-signalling festival, could go about it.
In my latest National Post column I say that whether American President Joe Biden broke the taboo on saying explicitly that the U.S. would defend Taiwan as a calculated geopolitical measure, or because he’s losing it, it makes the world a safer place that he blurted it out.
“‘All ‘progressive’ thought has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain…. Hitler, because in his joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.’”
Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Atlantic Monthly February 2002