In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the disastrous failure of Ottawa protest convoy policing wasn’t the result of suddenly resigned chief Peter Sloly not doing what his political masters wanted but of his doing it all too well.
“The object of all human life is play. I for one wish we did not have to fritter away time on frivolous things, like lectures and literature, the time we might have given to serious, solid and constructive work like cutting out cardboard figures and pasting colored tinsel upon them.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted by Robert Moore-Jumonville in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 #5 (March 2000)
“just as historians tell us that Richard I was not fit to fill the shoes of bold Henry II – and that Richard Cromwell was not fit to wear the mantle of his uncle – they might add in future years that Richard Nixon did not measure to the footsteps of Dwight D. Eisenhower.”
John F. Kennedy’s nomination acceptance speech July 16, 1960 (the irony being that the metaphor only works if we have some idea who these people were, yet JFK didn’t realize Richard “Tumble-Down Dick” Cromwell was not Oliver’s nephew but his son, or that Oliver Cromwell’s “mantle” is not something you would want to have fit you).
In my latest National Post column, while acknowledging the world-historic greatness of Justin Trudeau now that he has emergency powers, I ask whether our governments’ manifest incapacity to do even simple things including fixing health care derives from having long ago substituted make-believe for serious thought.
“Certainly the point that liberty is only one argument in the utility function, and you can put liberty on an indifference curve against bananas and have an isoproduct curve and indifference curves and this and that, is part of this moral colour-blindness.”
Walter Block in Michael A. Walker, ed., Freedom Democracy and Economic Welfare: Proceedings of an International Symposium
In my latest Epoch Times column I ask whether a government invoking emergency powers over protest crowdfunding has any interest in getting after literally hundreds of billions in dirty money being laundered in plain sight in Canada.
“Depend on it that if a man talks of his misfortunes, there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery, there never is any recourse to the mention of it.”
Samuel Johnson, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail January 31, 2003
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the real danger facing Canada isn’t tyranny but anarchy, with governments full of meddlesome ambition so lost in make-believe they freeze facing real-world problems.