Fake News

I know the press only too well.  Almost all editors hide away in spider-dens, men without thoughts of Family or Public Interest or the humble delights of jaunts out-of-doors, plotting how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions and fill their greedy pocketbooks by calumniating Statesmen who have given their all for the common good and who are vulnerable because they stand out in the fierce Light that beats around the Throne.

          Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

-        Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (1935)[1]

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[1] Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here, preface by Robert Bothwell (Oakville, ON: Rock’s Mill Press, 2016), p. 60.  Zero Hour is the fictitious work written by the imaginary populist and demagogue, Buzz Windrip (somewhat resembling Huey Long), in the book written by Sinclair Lewis, in 1935, where he suggests that fascism might even reach the highest office of the United States, as it already did in Germany and Italy at the time.  Of particular note here is Windrip’s attack on freedom of the so-called establishment press.

Descent into the quagmire

At just this time I read a dangerous, alluringly ambiguous sentence of Stendhal’s.  He wrote it as a coda after the restoration of 1814, an event that he felt to be a “descent into the quagmire,” just as I viewed the events of 1933.[1]

~ Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir (2002)

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[1] Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir, tr. Oliver Pretzel (New York: Picador, 2002), p. 205.  This memoir was first written in 1938.  Rediscovered after the author’s death in 1999, it was published in Germany in the year 2000 and later translated into English by the author’s son.

Camus and the Theory of Revolt (in a nutshell)

Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended.[1]

                                                                       - Albert Camus, L’Homme revolté (1951).

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[1] Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on a Man in Revolt, tr. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1991), p. 19.  While written between 1947 and 1951, Camus’ work also reflects his underground activities, begun in 1942, with the French Resistance network known as “Combat”.  Camus won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, and died an untimely death by car accident in January 1960, at the age of 46.

Grad Transitions, or B.C. student extortion - a Message to the Minister of Education

I thought I lived in Canada until encountering my son’s grade 12 “Grad Transitions” requirements.  Not only is he supposed to learn good money management but he is required to submit a breakdown of his budget to the school.  Note: a personal budget becomes more of a family budget when someone does not move out of the house to go to college or university.  Also required is a written explanation as to how my son’s post-secondary education is being funded.  This kind of financial plan is no one’s business but our own.

What’s worse is that failure to complete the Grad Transitions requirements means that your son or daughter will not graduate from High School. 

This is a B.C. wide provincial policy, and it amounts to nothing less than an invasion of family privacy followed by plain and simple extortion.  I thought we were supposed to raise our kids so they can look out for themselves (and avoid these sorts of unfortunate situations) but it is the school system (or, actually the state) that is sticking it to busy kids and treating their parents like herd animals.

Where does the B.C. government get the idea to treat people this way?  The Liberal government’s obsession with econometrics makes us perilously much like China, and we need look no further than School District 43’s symbiotic relationship with the Confucius Institute, which is intended to attract more students (read: money).  By reducing everything in education to a matter of costs, you risk throwing out the values that a good education is supposed to instill, and that is what has happened with the financial planning requirements for Grad Transitions.

But the students’ instincts are good.  They don’t all want to obey blindly – or even tell the truth (for if they did it would be a family intrusion). And for the most part they leave completion to the last minute, giving a similar degree of pushback (and a lot of work) to their very own Transitions teachers. Congratulations students: in so doing, you’ve just graduated!

Charles Baudelaire on Donald Trump

Two rights have been forgotten in the Declaration of the Rights of Man: the right to contradict oneself and the right to go away.[1]

- Charles Baudelaire

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[1] Quoted in Edward J. Hughes Albert Camus (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), p. 152.

Ni droite, ni gauche in Emmanuel Macron’s France: A Perspective

I almost believe that I am the only French liberal, and again I am not sure of myself.[1]

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      - Émile Faguet, Le Libéralisme (1903).

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[1] Émile Faguet, Le Libéralisme (Paris : Société française d’imprimerie et de librairie, 1903), p. 325.  Translated from the French.

Climate change "skeptics" and Hayek

Climate change “skeptics” and “deniers” often turn to F.A. Hayek’s criticism of science in order to justify their position.  Here is Hayek in The Road to Serfdom (often considered a sort of Bible among conservative thinkers and classical liberals) commenting on the “counter-revolutionary” role of science and the rise of National Socialism:

The way in which, in the end, with few exceptions, her scholars and scientists put themselves readily at the service of the new rulers is one of the most depressing and shameful spectacles in the whole history of the rise of National Socialism.  It is well known that particularly the scientists and the engineers, who had so loudly claimed to be the leaders on the march to a new and better world, submitted more readily than almost any other class to the new tyranny.[1]

- F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944).         

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[1] F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom.  Texts and Documents.  The Definitive Edition [Vol II of the Collected Works], ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 200,201.