On QR Calgary 770 AM radio with Rob Breakenridge, on behalf of the Aristotle Foundation, I defended the surprising decision by the Calgary Board of Education not to peel the name of our first and founding Prime Minister off a local school and fling it down the memory hole.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say what’s really scary about the multiple failed security screenings of the Eldidis is the evasive smugness with which politicians and bureaucrats defend their obviously dismal performance.
“Speaking fluently and clearly will be put at the heart of the national curriculum and given the same status as literacy and numeracy under a Labour government, Sir Keir Starmer has pledged. In an article for The Times the Labour leader says that the ‘almost exclusive’ focus on reading and writing at present is ‘short-sighted’ as he calls for oracy to be given priority at every level of a child’s education.”
The Times July 5, 2023 [the teaser referred to “oracy” and I went to scoff but stayed to listen]
“I do not find myself often agreeing with the late Lord Keynes, but he has never said a truer thing than when he wrote, on a subject on which his own experience has singularly qualified him to speak, that ‘the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new ideas after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply are not likely to be the newest. But soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good and evil.’”
Friedrich Hayek “‘Free’ Enterprise and Competitive Order” in Individualism and Economic Order
“One of the most famous English-language commentators in the 20th century, Malcolm Muggeridge, famously referred to ‘the great liberal death wish.’ In Canada, we could correctly call it the great Liberal death wish.”
Conrad Black in National Post Feb. 10, 2024 [roasting Justin Trudeau].
In my latest Epoch Times column I ask where the campus protests and encampments are over dreadful treatment of women and gays under in Afghanistan… even if you don’t get to blame Jews.
“Being roughed up by a WI [UK Women’s Institute, which just did same to Tony Blair] audience is like being savaged by a hamster, mugged by an Anglican vicar, or gang-raped by the League of Women Voters.”
John O’Sullivan in National Post June 14, 2000
“‘I tried to daydream, but my mind kept wandering.’”
“More Internet Taglines” in Gilbert magazine Vol. 5 #6 (April/May 2002)