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The latest from our COLUMNIST SECTION:
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03/11 at 07:23 AM
Ann Coulter
What’s Arabic For ‘You’re No Atticus Finch’? -
03/10 at 09:06 AM
Barbara Kay
Dropping the r-bomb -
03/09 at 09:01 PM
Mike S. Adams
The Breyer Patch -
03/08 at 09:01 PMMike S. Adams
The University of Notre Shame -
03/07 at 07:04 PM
David Warren
Tyranny of but -
03/07 at 07:18 AM
Doug Giles
Should Christians Use Saul Alinsky’s Tactics in Exposing Corruption? -
03/06 at 09:03 AM
Salim Mansur
Protect free speech, even if offensive -
03/06 at 07:45 AM
Rory Leishman
A rare display of political courage -
03/06 at 07:41 AMDavid Warren
The pampered, privileged public service -
03/05 at 09:21 AM
S. Wray Gregoire
Are We the World? -
03/05 at 09:19 AM
Susan Martinuk
Insite doesn’t do enough to change addicts -
03/03 at 06:49 PMAnn Coulter
Subprime Mortgage Crisis Hits Whorehouses -
03/03 at 07:08 AMDavid Warren
Competitive thrills -
03/03 at 07:05 AMBarbara Kay
Refugees R Us -
03/01 at 09:01 PMMike S. Adams
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PTBC Columnist Team
Columnists -- with bite! We feature conservative-friendly writers from Canada and the U.S. who help clarify the difference between liberals and conservatives. All have personally agreed to be a part of our team here at PTBC.
Latest Columns
David Warren
posted on Sunday, March 07, 2010
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Does freedom matter?
The short answer to that question, when I have asked various acquaintances of what I would call a “mildly liberal,” or middle-of-the-road disposition, is: “Yes, but ...”
This “but” may correspond to any of many suggested qualifications, and that is the first instructive thing. At best it is freedom versus order, or freedom versus equality, or freedom versus social security. Seldom has the position been thought through. Nor is the need for… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Saturday, March 06, 2010
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The Dominion budget tabled this week (or “federal” as we now say, in emulation of the Americans) was full of restraint. We have been assured of this by every media source I’ve seen, and the notion gains additional plausibility from the mild endorsements of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and other worthy, fairly independent monitors. “Baby steps in the right direction” was the message from another policy think tank, that focuses on family issues.
And that’s… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Wednesday, March 03, 2010
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Fourteen gold medals! Granted, the medal inflation to which William Watson the economist drew attention in these pages yesterday, but: 14 gold medals!
I shall remember the Vancouver Winter Olympics not for anything that happened there, except a couple of hockey games. And even those at one remove, for I caught only glimpses in Internet feeds, and missed some of the good bits when my server started glitching. (This is something we seldom had to… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Sunday, February 28, 2010
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I have sometimes thought it would be diverting to put a hockey team together. This idea is not, in itself, very original, but there are a couple of twists in my proposal that might make it uniquely entertaining. For I should like to have a “politically correct” hockey team.
Not sure, just yet, what league it would play in, but by the time it was assembled, I’m not sure what league would dare to turn… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Saturday, February 27, 2010
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A piece of ersatz medical research appeals to me deeply, as it might to any middle-aged person. A reader pinged it to me from the Harvard Business Review website: “Brain Functions that Improve with Age,” by Barbara Strauch.
“Ersatz” is perhaps unfair; and a German would anyway flinch at its use as an adjective. I mean the word only to suggest “substitute” in the sense of drawing on the work of fairly respectable neuroscientists; not… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Wednesday, February 24, 2010
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Now, before we start, I should correct a reader misapprehension about my views on President Barack Obama—who has just announced that he wants to give radical healthcare legislation another try, notwithstanding the electoral setbacks the last round cost his Democratic Party.
In a strange way I’m on his side. I want him to go for broke on this, and can only offer encouragement. In fact, I’m a little distressed that he’s been watering down the… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Sunday, February 21, 2010
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A spectre is haunting Europe, and America — the spectre of Keynesianism finally gone nuts. What began, not very innocently, as a suggestion that governments should run deficits in bad times, and surpluses in good times, gradually “evolved.” In the next phase, governments tried to balance at least the operating account during the best of times. In phase three, governments ran deficits by habit during the good times, but much bigger “stimulus” deficits during the… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Saturday, February 20, 2010
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The question of whether Turkey should be added to the European Union is rapidly being replaced by the question of whether Greece should remain inside it. The meltdown of government finances in the great stewpot of public debt has made the country an ungovernable shambles, even by its own demanding standards.
Yet while Greece is a special case—every country is a special case, and every one has its ungovernable-shambles aspect, as visitors to every country… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Wednesday, February 17, 2010
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It has been my habit, over recent years, to ring a little bell at Ash Wednesday, to my readers Christian and non-Christian alike; to remind the former, to explain to the latter.
Christmas and Easter are still noticed in the “mainstream media”—though seldom as religious events. Nevertheless everyone knows they have Christian origins. “All Hallows” may be forgotten, yet Hallowe’en has grown, during my lifetime. It has been morphing, in the childless, urbane, high-disposable-income neighbourhoods,… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Sunday, February 14, 2010
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One of my more reliable informants—the calendar on the wall—tells me that today is Valentine’s Day. I will not object if my reader omits the word “Saint” in front of that, for as I understand, the Valentine we celebrate, these days, is no saint. He is rather an abstract embodiment of sentimentalities popularly associated with the pagan god Eros.
A dark pagan god of desire and fertility. Sometimes, to understand him better, I have identified… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Saturday, February 13, 2010
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My intention today is to write about Iran, but I’m not sure that is possible. However, explaining why it might be impossible is a good way to write about Iran.
Almost all non-official electronic traffic from and within Iran began shutting down in preparation for Thursday, the 31st anniversary of the Iranian revolution. “Opposition protesters clashed with security forces” (in the current media jargon), around Tehran and elsewhere, but almost entirely “off camera.”
We had… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Wednesday, February 10, 2010
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Why is abortion so popular with women who would never dream of having an abortion?
This is among the questions I’ve been asking myself for years, while trying to understand what motivates people to vote the way they do. Again and again I see examples of people voting to the left of their actual convictions. At the bottom of it, I often suspect they vote not for the effect of government programs on themselves, but… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Sunday, February 07, 2010
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Like anything that involves killing babies, abortion tends to be controversial, and remains so in Canada more than 40 years after a bunch of white males decided to relax the common-law restraints on this practice. It is controversial in other countries, too: check out the United States, for instance, or the various European countries, in most of which it has long been “open season” on the unborn.
On the other hand, there is no public… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Saturday, February 06, 2010
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There was a stop-the-press item in science news this week. I was sorry to see it float by without serious media attention. We are finally out of the “Primordial Soup!” Let me explain.
Around 1929, Darwinists began recovering the ground they lost to the success of Mendelian genetics earlier in the century. Readers acquainted with the history will recall that followers of Darwin—the crusading, anti-religious zealots who formed the “smart set” in later Victorian biology—had… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Wednesday, February 03, 2010
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Yesterday was Candlemas, and therefore also Groundhog Day. Punxsutawney Phil, the weather-prognosticating groundhog of Gobbler’s Knob, predicted six more weeks of “global cooling.” I use that term with the same abandon as might the IPCC, of course: technically, the animal only predicts six more weeks “of winter.” I’m not sure how far away from his location in Pennsylvania the prediction is meant to apply.
In fact, I’ve never been able to get a clear answer… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Sunday, January 31, 2010
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Hardly anyone likes banks. I have a sneaking contrarian regard for them, because I think of bankers as droll people, and enjoy bankerly dark humour, which looks at any human enterprise as a wild dance atop the cliff of bankruptcy. At least, this used to be the case, though I must admit the bankers I’ve known have been mostly French, Dutch, or British.
I think of one blue-shirted gentleman named John, who presided over a… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Saturday, January 30, 2010
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It really wouldn’t do, in light of his death this week at age 91, for me to share what I truly think about J.D. Salinger; especially after mentioning in this column only five years ago that his most famous work, Catcher in the Rye, was “a book I believe to have been written ... under direct demonic possession.” So let me go about this as gently as I can.
We are instructed, at least by… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Wednesday, January 27, 2010
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We take it for granted up here in Canada that our political class should tell us how to spend our own money in election campaigns. Perhaps not everywhere in Canada: they still don’t think that way in Alberta, where all the sane people seem to have congregated for a last stand. But in discussing the matter with friends here in Ontario—a province now subsidized by the taxpayers of Alberta—the idea that persons, whether human or… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010
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Perhaps I am stupid—a number of my correspondents think this is the explanation—but I am frequently unable to make any sense at all of media reporting on religion. This puts me at a disadvantage in responding—as I am sometimes asked to do—to the latest reports.
Almost any public statement made by the pope or a Vatican official would serve as an example, and I sometimes wonder why they bother to say anything at all, given… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Saturday, January 23, 2010
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We cannot know, when the news hits us, whether it is for good or bad. Superficially, the answer is often obvious enough. An earthquake, for instance, cannot be a good thing. Not in itself. But who can guess what redemption may be worked through it? This thought may outrage some atheist readers: but it needs saying, if we are even to begin to “vindicate the ways of God to Man.”
Likewise it is hard to… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Wednesday, January 20, 2010
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The media and political response to Haiti’s disaster was as predictable as the effect of a 7.0-magnitude earthquake on Port-au-Prince. The pictures and emotions are still running high, and people are giving generously to more than 10,000 charitable agencies. The scale of that is bewildering; the opportunities for corruption are proportionally large.
A natural disaster is the prime fundraising opportunity for any NGO, and the posters go up on their websites right away. Yet very… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Sunday, January 17, 2010
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The “just-so” story was defined by Rudyard Kipling, in his magisterial and exemplary work, Just So Stories for Little Children, published in 1902. I remember it well as a formative masterpiece of my own early childhood—after the Pookie books, and before the all-but-scriptural Kim. It is the work in which Kipling explains e.g. How the Whale got his Throat, How the Camel got his Hump, How the Leopard got his Spots, How the First Letter… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Saturday, January 16, 2010
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The epicentre of the earthquake that levelled Port-au-Prince this week was at a known distance west-south-west of the city, and at a known shallow depth. Although the date of the earthquake could not be predicted, it was known to be fairly inevitable.
The amplitude of the first “temblor” and each of more than a dozen powerful aftershocks could all be measured and possibly predicted. Given all this information, it would also have been possible to… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Wednesday, January 13, 2010
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The best defence is a good offence, according to ancestral lore; and as Canadians we understand the principle in hockey. Play the game in the other team’s zone and they won’t be scoring many goals on you.
Not that you can do without a couple of defencemen (or a goalie for that matter); but even there, the point holds. You want defencemen who can move the play forward, who can get the puck out of… (Read more)
David Warren
posted on Sunday, January 10, 2010
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First, let’s kill all the lawyers.
I hasten to specify, this is a quote. And to add that some of my best friends are lawyers. And moreover, even after exempting them individually, and despite my very personal experiences with such monstrous stuff as Ontario family law, I do not recommend killing all the lawyers. Such are my religious convictions that I will insist: not even one lawyer should be harmed. In any physical way.
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