• Week of 12.05.2013 — Apply Now to Live on Mars | Nazi-Themed Wagner Opera Now Cancelled | Air Force One is For Sale | Pakistan Election | Liberia Journalists Protest with Black Front Pages | Iron Man Publicity Stunt Fail | QUIZ TIME: 4th Grade South Carolina Science | 10,000 Dissidents Detained in Eritrea | The Cardinal Sean O’Malley Boycott
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• Podcast 35 | Week of 24.03.2013
Article of the Week: Why Canada Needs the Sasquatch, Vice Magazine.
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WITH THOMAS FLANAGAN and William Whatcott so heavily in the news, section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms might well be designated trope of the moment. Section 2(b), as we are of late reminded, grants to Canadian citizens their freedoms of conscience and religion, thought, belief, opinion and expression. The Charter also submits these freedoms only to “such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”
THERE’S NO USE in a writer denying the pleasures derived of notoriety, but it happened this week that I was “Freshly Pressed” and that I had feelings about it which weren’t entirely comforting. In case you don’t know, to be Freshly Pressed (or FPd, as I have discovered the WordPress folks put it) is to have a post chosen by the editors of WordPress for the landing page at wordpress.com. This arbitrary distinction — as I feel it to be — brings with it a huge momentary increase in traffic, comments, email and polite approbation. In short, here comes and goes your fifteen minutes of fame.
RICHARD BOUDREAUX’S euphemistic coverage yesterday, in the Wall Street Journal, of an “anti-Putin band” underscores the respective limits of polite discourse both here and in the former Soviet state. In Putin’s Russia, which is increasingly also the Mother Russia of the Orthodox Church, the cost of transgressing polite discourse’s state invigilated boundaries mounts.
• Podcast 006 | Week of 07.29.2012
ELECTORAL GAINS of the Muslim Brotherhood, most recently in Egypt and Libya, suggest that the Arab Spring came in like a lion and went out like a lamb to slaughter. Democracy, having conquered the Arab world, has yielded to Islamist autocrats its spoils.
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 