It's no secret that David Warren is - by far - my favourite newspaper columnist in Canada. Cosh and Coyne can be fun or interesting but perhaps not both at once. Steyn is funny and accurate but sometimes a wee bit too rapid fire for my tastes. Warren also adds levels of maturity and depth that are remarkable in someone who works in the go go world of modern media.
Here are snippets from three of his most recent columns, proof that his short rest served him well.
From "In Praise of Slow":
Not everything done fast is a mistake. There are flukes. There are geniuses who move at speed with a kind of perfect pitch in whatever form of music they are making. Such people will never be statistically significant. More familiar is the phenomenon of El Thicko moving at speed, to legislate something in the long train from social assistance to no-fault divorce” to “same-sex marriage” -- with a million arbitrary and ill-considered acts of government regulation in between (most designed to ameliorate the effects of previous legislation). To a man of slow wit, such as myself, it makes no sense to rush into something before considering unintended consequences. And verily, such a review would have eliminated most of what our governments have done since, say, 1945. I mean this seriously: that almost everything a government does, that is not a specific response to a potential or actual catastrophe, is likely to prove counter-productive over time. Unfortunately, the fast-witted people have been redefining catastrophe” until it has come to mean opposition to anything they want to do next.From "A Letter to Quebec":
Let me begin by telling you what I don't want to say. I don't want to say, "I wuv you." Especially, visitors from Ontario have been telling you this, whenever they've felt you were getting uppity. They are like the unfortunate husband, who does not realize that his wife hates him. ... I am speaking to you from a province that truly doesn't get it. We don't get that you've had enough. We don't get the degree to which you are tired, not only of the corruption, but of the sheer malice of the Liberal Party. They are getting about equally tired in the West. And according to the polls, we, in Ontario, have decided the Liberal Party must stay, for reasons of "national unity". In other words, the Liberals have become the separatist party of Ontario. In other words, the Liberals have set things up with Ontario, so the only way to shake them off is by leaving the country. Canada's most talented people do that every day; now it becomes the turn of the provinces. As you perhaps noticed, my analogy was incomplete. Ontario is in some sort of weird old Mormon or Arabian marriage, in which there are several wives. Were it not for the oil dowry that came with Alberta, we would have trouble paying for them all. That Alberta also, increasingly, wants out of the marriage should be no surprise to either of us: there is nothing in it for them, whatever. We just take their money, they get nothing in return, unless you count spousal abuse. The Liberals and our "national" (i.e. the Toronto) media dump all over Alberta. They use the word "Canadian" specifically to exclude them.I think that one of the things I least want is to loved by Ontarians. I already have parents, thanks. From "Creation Science":
Dr. Jastrow -- unquestionably an accomplished astronomer -- says that prior to Edwin Hubble'’s demonstrations of deep galactic fields at the Mount Wilson observatory in the 1920s, scientists believed the universe was no bigger than the galaxy in which the earth happens to be located. This is simply not true. For centuries before this, and among the diehards for several decades after, scientists assumed the universe is infinite. It was Hubble who ultimately established that it isn't. This fact is significant because, underlying both the old ideas about physical cosmology, and Darwin'’s quaint theory of evolution by natural selection, was the notion that random evolutionary processes had as much time as they needed to occur. This was necessary to avoid the question of creation”. But now that we know they didnÂ’t, the question of creation swims, despite the best efforts of “scientists, directly into view.More on The Priveleged Planet.
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