In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the only surprise about the Strategic Innovation Fund being used to subsidize things that are politically expedient is that anyone is surprised, including its creators.
In my latest National Post column I seize on two New Year’s Eve press releases of the sort that will make 2019 yet another year of political mendacity if we tolerate it.
“Nobody worries, within the ‘hard’ sciences, about the morality of molecules. Even quarks, whatever their assigned properties of color, flavor, and charm, have yet to be regarded as good or evil. But no work of history of which I’m aware has ever been written without making some kind of statement – explicitly or implicitly, consciously or subconsciously – about where its subjects lie along the ubiquitous spectrum that separates the admirable from the abhorrent. You can’t escape thinking about history in moral terms…. The reason is that we are, unlike all others, moral animals…. even Hitler knew that the Holocaust was immoral, or he wouldn’t have gone to the efforts he did to try to conceal it. To try to purge human nature of a moral sense is to deny what distinguishes it. You’d be writing the histories of schools of fish, flocks of birds, and herds of deer, not people. The issue for historians, then, is not whether we should make moral judgements, but how we can do so responsibly…”
John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History
“Economics is really about understanding the world – and changing it – and not in a messianic fashion, but in an honest fashion.”
James J. Heckman, co-winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Economics, quoted in Ottawa Citizen Oct. 12, 2000
“It ain’t what a man don’t know as makes him a fool, but what he does know that ain’t so.”
The “homely wisdom of Josh Billings (1818-1885)” quoted in Daniel Boorstin Cleopatra’s Nose
“Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute.”
“British novelist G. B. Stearn” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail November 15, 2007